Through happenstance surfing, The Tracker this morning found a minor synchronicity in news reports from around the world that neatly brackets the debate and news impact over global warming and storm intensity. Maybe they’ll be stronger, maybe weaker. And activists tend to oversimplify – that, seriously, is their job – no matter what the scientists say. These aren’t big or important stories or outlets – just a slice of the media life for today.

Storms worse:

Times of India has a story, uncredited to any agency but it’s ANI, on some results from a University of Michigan tornado, dust devil, and general atmospheric vorticity fanatic named Nilton Renno. He has reduced the simplifications in standard Bernoulli-derived mathematical models to develop a new “equation” it says here (more like a set of them or algorithm, one suspects). It models the impact of global warming – mainly at sea – on intensity of tornadoes, dust devils, hurricane/cyclones, and other convection-fueled twisties in storms. The implication is they’ll all tend toward more intensity. (This piece doesn’t have much on it, but Renno is an intriguing character who predicted and now studies dust devils on Mars – and chased terrestrial versions around the Southwestern desert when he was at the U. of Arizona). It’s a bit of a surprise this got little pickup.

Grist for the Mill: U. Michigan Press Release. (with a terrific hurricane-from-space video clip).

Hurricanes, at least, Weaker:

Ottawa Citizen’s Tom Spears reports on a NOAA researcher’s look at historic data. It appears that land-falling hurricanes in the US have weakened just a bit, on average, during the time that northern Atlantic temperatures have risen. Looks like wind shear has picked up and is smearing the tops of more storms, it says here. The study is in Geophysical Research Letters. This is less-than-breaking news – the report was out, with some media interest, in January.

Grist for the Mill: GRL abstract ;

“We are starting to see a rise in huge storms”:

So says a local activist worried about global warming, without further elaboration, as quoted in the Tewksbury Advocate (Mass) by reporter Chloe Gotsis. And that, in a nutshell, is about how these arguments filter to the streets.

Pic source ;

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.