- MONTEREY, Calif (Reuters) -- The record Atlantic hurricane season last
year can be attributed to global warming, several top experts, including
a leading US government storm researcher, said on Monday.
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- "The hurricanes we are seeing are
indeed a direct result of climate change and it's no longer something we'll
see in the future, it's happening now," said Greg Holland, a division
director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
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- Holland told a packed hall at the American
Meteorological Society's 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology
that the wind and warmer water conditions that fuel storms that form in
the Caribbean are "increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems
to be no other conclusion you can logically draw."
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- His conclusion will be debated throughout
the week-long conference, as other researchers present opposing papers
that say changing wind and temperature conditions in the tropics are due
to natural events, not the accumulation of carbon dioxide emissions clouding
the Earth.
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- Many of the experts gathered in the coastal
city of Monterey, California, are federal employees. The Bush administration
contends global warming is an unproven theory.
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- While many of the conference's 500 scientists
seem to agree that a warming trend in the tropics is causing more and stronger
hurricanes than usual, not all agree that global warming is to blame.
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- Some, like William Gray, a veteran hurricane
researcher at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, attributed
the warming to natural cycles. Gray said he believes salinity buildups
and movements with ocean currents cause warming and cooling cycles. He
predicted the Caribbean water will continue to warm for another five to
10 years, then start cooling.
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- MORE WARMING TO COME
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- Whatever the cause, computer projections
indicate the warming to date -- about one degree Fahrenheit (half a degree
Celsius) in tropical water -- is "the tip of the iceberg" and
the water will warm three to four times as much in the next century, said
Thomas Knutson, explaining projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New
Jersey.
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- Adam Lea, a postdoctoral student at Britain's
University College London in Dorking, Surrey, presented research based
on British, German, Russian and Canadian studies that concludes half of
the increased hurricane activity in the tropics could be attributed to
global warming.
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- Holland, director of the Mesoscale and
Microscale Meteorology Division of the federal research center, said tropical
storm anomalies in the 1940s and 1950s can be explained by natural variability.
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- But he said carbon dioxide started changing
traceable patterns in the 1970s and by the early 1990s, the atmospheric
results were affecting the storm numbers and intensities.
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- "What we're seeing right now in
global climate temperature is a signature of climate change," said
Holland, a native of Australia. "The large bulk of the scientific
community say what we are seeing now is linked directly to greenhouse gases."
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- Hurricane Katrina, which tore onto the
Louisiana and Mississippi coasts on Aug. 29, was the deadliest Atlantic
hurricane in 77 years and the costliest ever, with property damages estimated
at US$75 billion.
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- This year, the weather service's Tropical
Prediction Center expects more hurricanes than usual, but not as many as
last year's record 14.
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