COORDINATED BY ECLAC: STUDY BEGINS ON THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN CENTRAL AMERICA.

(San Pedro Sula, 27 May 2008) Estimates indicate that Central America produces less than 0.5% of the planet’s carbon dioxide, but is one of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Rising atmospheric temperatures and sea levels and the decrease and instability of rains affect production, infrastructure, and the population’s means of subsistence and health. Moreover, the capacity of the environment to provide essential services may diminish gradually, while droughts and hurricanes intensify.

If Central American societies do not take steps to address these problems, what will be the economic impact on the population? What will be the toll on fiscal budgets of responding to the consequences? How will the region deal with the effects of climate change on people’s health? What options does Central America have to adapt, and how much will they cost?

Faced with these issues, environmental officials in the region and their integration body, the Central American Commission on Environment and Development (CCAD), ECLAC’s subregional headquarters in Mexico, and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) announced the undertaking of a study on The Economics of Climate Change in Central America, to analyze the challenges, benefits and costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change.

This initiative is borne out of the concern of the Presidents of the Central American Integration System to develop strategies to face the impact of global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions, as announced today in the context of the Summit on Climate Change and Environment.

The study seeks to prompt discussion over climate change, integrating economic and social decision-makers with scientists and environmental experts, and alert society in general about the seriousness of the situation. It also hopes to stimulate debate over alternative actions at a national and regional level that must be taken urgently in a sustained manner.

The study will use the general methodological guidelines of the Stern Report on the economic impact of climate change in the world, adapting it to the region.

The research will include an analysis of the global context, highlight the possible evolution of emissions and the world economy, and set forth macroeconomic scenarios for Central America. In addition, studies will be carried out on the impact and costs for climate-sensitive sectors, such as water, agriculture, health, poverty and extreme natural phenomena. These studies will serve as input for a model of integrated valorization that will estimate the economic impact in the region, enabling proposals on adaptation policy options with possible benefits for mitigation.

Given its complexity and depth, the study may take an estimated 15 months to elaborate at a cost of approximately US$1.8 million. The British government, through its cooperation agency, will support the project initially with a million dollars. ECLAC will be responsible for the technical coordination, while Central American nations will contribute with their personnel to accompany the implementation of the project’s different activities.

The study for Central America is another of a series of similar initiatives presently being carried out, such as the study The Economics of Climate Change in Mexico, in which ECLAC also participates.

There is also information exchange with current studies in Brazil and the preliminary study on the Andean Community of Nations (CAN).

ECLAC is supporting the negotiation of another similar study for the Caribbean.

The study for Central America will likely benefit from the results of the Mexican case (2008), and contribute to a regional appreciation of the economic impact of climate change in Latin America and the Caribbean.

For more information, please contact Pedro Cote Baraibar, Coordinator of Communications at ECLAC’s Mexico office. Telephone:(+52 55) 5263 9715 and mobile (52 1 55) 2109 7227. Email:  pedro.cote at cepal.org

White House Issues Climate Report.
By SETH BORENSTEIN, from AP, Posted 2008-05-30 00 on aol

WASHINGTON (May 29) - Under a court order and four years late, the White House Thursday produced what it called a science-based “one-stop shop” of specific threats to the United States from man-made global warming.

Under a court order and four years late - America’s Climate Threats.
A new White House report lists the following risks due to future climate changes in the U.S.

Heat Deaths: Heat fatalities in Los Angeles could rise by over 1,000 by 2080. The Midwest and Northeast are even more vulnerable to an increase.

While the report has no new science in it, { But it has a new address in it !!!} it pulls together different U.S. studies and localizes international reports into one comprehensive document required by law.

The 271-page report is notable because it is something the Bush administration has fought in the past.

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist who was not involved in the effort, called it “a litany of bad news in store for the U.S.”

And biologist Thomas Lovejoy, one of the scientists who reviewed the report for the federal government, said: “It basically says the America we’ve known we can no longer count on. It’s a pretty dramatic picture of all kinds of change rippling through natural systems across the country. And all of that has implications for people.”

White House associate science director Sharon Hays, in a teleconference with reporters, declined to characterize the findings as bad, but said it is an issue the administration takes seriously. She said the report was comprehensive and “communicates what the scientists are telling us.” {What else was expected does she think? Does it have in the preamble that addiction to oil has cost recently also over 4,000 US lives in Iraq?}

That includes:

Increased heat deaths and deaths from climate-worsened smog. In Los Angeles alone yearly heat fatalities could increase by more than 1,000 by 2080, and the Midwest and Northeast are most vulnerable to increased heat deaths.

Worsening water shortages for agriculture and urban users. From California to New York, lack of water will be an issue.

A need for billions of dollars in more power plants (one major cause of global warming gases) to cool a hotter country. The report says summer cooling will mean Seattle’s energy consumption would increase by 146 percent with the warming that could come by the end of the century.

More death and damage from wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters and extreme weather. In the last three decades, wildfire season in the West has increased by 78 days.

Increased insect infestations and food- and waterborne microbes and diseases. Insect and pathogen outbreaks to the forests are causing $1.5 billion in annual losses.

“Finally, climate change is very likely to accentuate the disparities already evident in the American health care system,” the report said. “Many of the expected health effects are likely to fall disproportionately on the poor, the elderly, the disabled and the uninsured.”

The report was required by a 1990 law which says that every four years the government must produce a comprehensive science assessment of global warming. It had not been done since 2000.

Environmental groups got a court order last year to force the Bush administration to produce the document by the end of this month. Hays said the White House has preferred issuing studies on individual global warming issues, such as an agricultural effects report that was released on Tuesday.

“It’s totally begrudging,” said Rick Piltz, director of Climate Science Watch at the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, a whistleblowers’ organization. “It’s important the government go on record honestly acknowledging this stuff.”

 http://news.aol.com/story/_a/white-house…

Opinion

The Rich Get Hungrier.
Wednesday 28 May 2008

by: Amartya Sen, The New York Times

In January of 2007, tens of thousands of Mexicans marched in the streets to protest a leap of 50 percent in the price of corn tortillas.

Will the food crisis that is menacing the lives of millions ease up - or grow worse over time?

The answer may be both. The recent rise in food prices has largely been caused by temporary problems like drought in Australia, Ukraine and elsewhere. Though the need for huge rescue operations is urgent, the present acute crisis will eventually end. But underlying it is a basic problem that will only intensify unless we recognize it and try to remedy it.

It is a tale of two peoples. In one version of the story, a country with a lot of poor people suddenly experiences fast economic expansion, but only half of the people share in the new prosperity. The favored ones spend a lot of their new income on food, and unless supply expands very quickly, prices shoot up. The rest of the poor now face higher food prices but no greater income, and begin to starve. Tragedies like this happen repeatedly in the world.

A stark example is the Bengal famine of 1943, during the last days of the British rule in India. The poor who lived in cities experienced rapidly rising incomes, especially in Calcutta, where huge expenditures for the war against Japan caused a boom that quadrupled food prices. The rural poor faced these skyrocketing prices with little increase in income.

Misdirected government policy worsened the division. The British rulers were determined to prevent urban discontent during the war, so the government bought food in the villages and sold it, heavily subsidized, in the cities, a move that increased rural food prices even further. Low earners in the villages starved. Two million to three million people died in that famine and its aftermath.

Much discussion is rightly devoted to the division between haves and have-nots in the global economy, but the world’s poor are themselves divided between those who are experiencing high growth and those who are not. The rapid economic expansion in countries like China, India and Vietnam tends to sharply increase the demand for food. This is, of course, an excellent thing in itself, and if these countries could manage to reduce their unequal internal sharing of growth, even those left behind there would eat much better.

But the same growth also puts pressure on global food markets - sometimes through increased imports, but also through restrictions or bans on exports to moderate the rise in food prices at home, as has happened recently in countries like India, China, Vietnam and Argentina. Those hit particularly hard have been the poor, especially in Africa.

There is also a high-tech version of the tale of two peoples. Agricultural crops like corn and soybeans can be used for making ethanol for motor fuel. So the stomachs of the hungry must also compete with fuel tanks.

Misdirected government policy plays a part here, too. In 2005, the United States Congress began to require widespread use of ethanol in motor fuels. This law combined with a subsidy for this use has created a flourishing corn market in the United States, but has also diverted agricultural resources from food to fuel. This makes it even harder for the hungry stomachs to compete.

Ethanol use does little to prevent global warming and environmental deterioration, and clear-headed policy reforms could be urgently carried out, if American politics would permit it. Ethanol use could be curtailed, rather than being subsidized and enforced.

{ So - even a Nobel Peace Prize Wining Economist, of the stature of Amartia Sen, can show total ignorance yet speak up in loud voice, making public that ignorance, by not trying to analyze what he was fed as information by clearly vested interests. We said this many times, but in reverence to Professor Sen, we will repeat this once more:

Ethanol could have been made out of the corn that was NOT GROWN, rather then from the food commodity. The point is that the agricultural policy in the US and in the EU is based on “Set-Asides” that leave land out of production in a subsidization of the commodity prices policy. So there is land available to grow an extra amount of corn.}
The global food problem is not being caused by a falling trend in world production, or for that matter in food output per person (this is often asserted without much evidence). It is the result of accelerating demand. However, a demand-induced problem also calls for rapid expansion in food production, which can be done through more global cooperation.

While population growth accounts for only a modest part of the growing demand for food, it can contribute to global warming, and long-term climate change can threaten agriculture. Happily, population growth is already slowing and there is overwhelming evidence that women’s empowerment (including expansion of schooling for girls) can rapidly reduce it even further.

What is most challenging is to find effective policies to deal with the consequences of extremely asymmetric expansion of the global economy. Domestic economic reforms are badly needed in many slow-growth countries, but there is also a big need for more global cooperation and assistance. The first task is to understand the nature of the problem.

———-

Amartya Sen, who teaches economics and philosophy at Harvard, received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998 and is the author, most recently, of “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny.”

Information From:  jeh1 at columbia.edu

This Sunday evening (June 1, 2008) 7:30 pm - at Cary Hall in Lexington, Massachusetts - a few hundred yards from where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired , the Lexington Global Warming Action Coalition (info at www.lexgwac.org) will hold an appeal to the governor om matters of climate change.

The speakers will be: Mark Bowen, author of “Censoring Science” and James (Jim) Hansen who knows a thing or two about how climate science was censored.

Perhaps there is an analogy between the gap that developed between the best interests of the American people and policies of despotic King George and the gap that has developed between the best interests of the public (and nature) and the policies (mainly those related to energy) that we now live under.

A different sort of revolution, within the democratic framework, is needed, but it won’t be easy. What makes it a hair-raising drama, with an outcome far from assured, is the combination of climate system inertia and resulting planetary energy imbalance, energy system inertia, and climate system tipping points.

There is a $5 admission.

Climate Destruction Will Produce Millions of ‘Envirogees’
By Scott Thill, AlterNet. Posted May 27, 2008.

The rise of environmental disasters from climate change and destruction of ecosystems will create a surge of refugees across the planet. Chew on this word, jargon lovers. Envirogee.

It carries more 21st century buzz than its semi-official designation climate refugee, which is a displaced individual who has been forced to migrate because of environmental devastation. Maybe the buzzword will catch on faster and shed some much-needed light on what will become a serious problem, probably by the end of this or the next decade. That light is crucial, because so far envirogees haven’t been fully recognized by those who certify the civil liberties of Earth’s various populations, whether that is the United Nations or local and national governments whose people are increasingly on the move for a whole new set of devastating reasons.

In short, immigration is about to enter a new phase, which resembles an old one with a 21st century twist. For thousands of years, humanity has fled across Earth’s surface fearing instability and in search of sustainability. But that resource war has kicked into overdrive thanks to our current climate crisis — a manufactured war with its own clock. And the clock is ticking.

From earthquakes in China to cyclones in Myanmar to water rationing in Los Angeles, societies are shifting like their borders. And all the outcry over so-called illegal immigration neglects to answer one time-honored question: If the borders aren’t standing still, why should the people who live in their outlines do so? Especially when they’re under attack from catastrophic floods, fires, droughts and any number of other environmental dangers?

Right now, the 1951 Geneva Convention does not recognize the envirogee phenomenon, instead focusing on immigration as a result of political persecution. But then again, it was established over five decades ago when Earth’s climate was anything but a terrorist. But the Geneva Convention, like everything that must adapt or die, needs to mutate in time with the rest of the world and its hyperconsuming inhabitants in order to remain relevant in our still-new millennium.

Here are some startling envirogee numbers to crunch: According to the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Earth’s fracturing communities will have 150 million envirogees by 2050. According to Australian climatologist Dr. Graeme Pearman, coastal flooding resulting from a mere two-degree rise in temperature would kick 100 million people out of their danger-zone homes by 2100.

Here’s more scary data. Desertification is claiming land from China to Morocco to Tunisia and beyond at an increasing rate. New Orleans and parts of Alaska are slowly sliding into the sea, while the former, as Hurricane Katrina ably illustrated, is becoming a reliable target for intensifying weather events, human corruption and half-assed infrastructure. Aquifers around the world are shrinking, while acidification is claiming cropland in Egypt and beyond. Hypoxia has claimed portions of the ocean itself with alarming speed, as stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific lose oxygen and, by extension, the marine life that not only feeds millions but establishes the continuity of the food chain.

No food chain, no food. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

But numbers are fallible, which is another way of saying the above figures are most likely best-case scenarios. In other words, the future is now. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the IPCC might have taken home a Nobel for their statistics and bleeding hearts, but their math was significantly off. Worse, the rate at which these things happen is rising exponentially.

“The rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentrations accelerated over recent decades along with fossil fuel emissions,” explained a report on methane and CO2 rises by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Organization for Atmospheric Administration. “Since 2000, annual increases of two ppm or more have been common, compared with 1.5 ppm per year in the 1980s and less than one ppm per year during the 1960s.” As for methane, in 2007 it exploded by 27 million tons after a decade with relatively no rise at all. Think about that next time you eat that Happy Meal.

So what’s an envirogee to do, other than opt out of wasted fantasies like Happy Meals, factory farming, bottled water and Hummers? What else? Move.

Which is what envirogees worldwide are already doing right now, by choice or by gunpoint, and will do more often than not as situations on the ground and in the air deteriorate.

The conflict raging in Darfur is a sobering example of the complexity of the situation. It has so far displaced 2-3 million people, and for all the talk of political or religious persecution, the fact remains that it is at its root an environmental crisis. An arid desert whose water is drying up by the day, Darfur is one of the first flashpoints of our new phase of climate conflict, a conflict that U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon explained in the Washington Post as one “that grew at least in part from desertification, ecological degradation and a scarcity of resources, foremost among them water.” But this too should have been foreseen: According to remote sensing, Darfur sits atop of an underground lake that once used to hold over 600 cubic miles of water and dried up thousands of years ago.

And like Darfur, we are numbly sitting atop our climatological past while it races to catch up with us. Parched by thirst and hungry for fossil fuels which, in turn, only exacerbate that thirst and the wars it engenders, envirogees are streaming out of these hot zones into less murderous ones, whose inhabitants are circling their wagons on the outsiders. Civil wars are breaking out. Outsiders, in turn, are becoming invaders. The irony is rich.

It gets richer, or poorer, depending on where you stand on peak oil. The planet’s shrinking petroleum reserves are now more valuable than ever, and the prices for its capture and capitalization show zero sign of returning to normal. That expense is also beginning to be measured in lives, as carbon concentration exponentially increases and weather events become more extreme.

And you all know what they say about extreme times calling for extreme measures.

We’ve been here before, which is to say on the brink of extinction. In one instance, drought shrunk our numbers to about 2,000 scattered in a diaspora across Africa, a fearsome thought for a 21st century superpower that may be entering its own permanent drought. But the wrinkle is different this time around the tightrope: We built this coming dystopia with our own hands.

And that’s going to reshape not just immigration policy, but the concept of immigration altogether. And that’s where the envirogee comes in. The envirogee, you see, is on the run from himself.

In other words, and no matter how much blowhards like CNN’s Lou Dobbs bitch and whine, the inconvenient truth of climate change, and its rampant resource wars for what’s left of the planet’s stores, remains a reality. Beneath genocide in Darfur lies a desert that used to be a lake. There probably isn’t a better metaphor for our current hyperhighway to hell in existence, if one could argue that it was a metaphor to begin with. But one can’t, because it is reality, pure and simple. And so are envirogees, regardless of the outdated assertions of the Geneva Convention or the staid refusals of the insurance industry to wake up and smell the hurricanes.

“If we keep going down this path,” French prime minister Nicholas Sarkozy argued to the superpowers gathered at the Major Economics Meeting in Paris last month, “climate change will encourage the immigration of people with nothing towards areas where the population do have something, and the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others,” he stressed.

That is, we won’t be worried about Mexicans coming to the U.S. for economic reasons, or Africans doing the same in France and England. We will be worried about hyperviolent cyclones, floods and droughts destroying what’s left of our jobs and the people who want them, as we all pack our crap and move northward, where temperate weather and more bountiful supplies of water, gas and food lie. We will be the ones enduring the hard stares and perhaps bullets fired from locals who are circling their wagons against victims of their own consumption and apathy.

Whether or not we can settle, literally, with that solution, time will tell. But according to the continually underperforming science of climate crisis, we won’t settle for long. Barring any meaningful sociopolitical or economic engagement, to say nothing of much-needed technological revolution, on the issue, we’ll have turned from territorial citizens into climate nomads, all in a cosmological eyeblink.

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

From:  jamesdavidford at hotmail.com

CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS: CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION.

Title: Climate change adaptation in developed nations.
Editors: Dr James D. Ford and Dr Lea Berrang Ford, Dept. of Geography, McGill University, Montreal
Publisher: Springer, Netherlands.

Introduction

Recent experience from Hurricane Katrina to the European Heatwave has challenged the notion that developed nations have limited vulnerability to climatic risks. Climate change is expected to change the magnitude, frequency and spatial distribution of climatic risks affecting developed nations, with potential wide ranging implications. In many regions climate change is already having an impact. Finding ways to reduce or moderate the negative effects of current and projected climate change (i.e. adaptation) is emerging as key area of climate policy. Governments, business, municipalities, industry, and NGOs are among those seeking to identify adaptation needs and policy entry points. As many commentators have noted, however, there is an ‘adaptation deficit’ between the policies and research that are needed to promote and support adaptation and what is currently available. This book will profile the latest research in climate change adaptation and policy analysis in developed nations, identifying adaptation strategies which can reduce climate change vulnerability in different sectors, highlighting examples of best practice for managing climate risks, evaluating cases where adaptation plans have been developed, and outlining challenges to effective adaptation. The book will be targeted at the scientific community and policy makers involved in climate change adaptation planning.

Call for chapters

Chapters are being sought from researchers, policy makers, and others involved in climate change adaptation planning in the following areas:

1.Public health and climate change adaptation
2.Adaptation to climate change in the urban environment
3.Climate change adaptation in industry
4.Adapting to climate change in the agricultural sector
5.Climate change adaptation in resource dependent communities

Chapters should focus on developed nations, defined here as those nations comprising annex II to the UNFCCC. Each chapter will be limited to a maximum of 3500 words, reflecting the objective of the book to introduce readers to a range of key issues on climate change adaptation in a number of sectors. All articles will be subject to peer review. Preference will be given to articles focusing on practical case-studies and examples of adaptation initiatives. Submissions related to municipal, industrial, and government adaptation approaches are particularly encouraged.

Authors are invited to submit a short proposal (250 words maximum), describing the topic and scope of the proposed chapter.

Important Dates

Important dates include:

1.Deadline for submission of short proposals: June 25th 2008
2.Proposals selected/ approved for full article submission: July 2008
3.Deadline for submission of full articles: November 30th 2008
4.Expected publication: May 2009.

Contact information

For more information, or to submit a proposal, contact the book editors, James Ford or Lea Berrang Ford at  climatechangebook.geog at mcgill.ca

It has been over 12 months since the launch of the first version of the CERSPA – Certified Emission Reduction Sale and Purchase Agreement. The CERSPA initiative aims at elaborating and maintaining (through regular updates) a simple and balanced carbon contract template (and an comprehensive explanatory Guidance Document) to assist CDM project developers in fully understanding the terms and conditions under which they sell their CERs.

The CERSPA Carbon Contract Template has received substantial positive feedback and it is now widely used throughout Latin America and Asia. As the CERSPA and Guidance Document are meant to be living documents, we are now initiating a complete review process of the existing documents in order to prepare a second version of the CERSPA (“CERSPA V.2”).

If you would like to contribute to the CERSPA review process, please send your comments, suggestions and ideas to  t.chagas at climatefocus.com.

You may also provide your input and comments on the CERSPA through our online Forum for discussion available at http://www.cerspa.org/. The Forum is open to the participation of all!

Looking forward to receiving your comments and contributions!

Thiago Chagas    tb.chagas at gmail.com

Climate Focus B.V.
Minervahuis III
Rodezand 34
3011 AN Rotterdam
The Netherlannds

www.climatefocus .com

Scientist Shifts View on Global Warming

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP
Posted: 2008-05-18 15:55:50
Filed Under: Science News
WASHINGTON (May 18) - Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.

Vincent Laforet, Pool / Getty Images

Are There Benefits
To Global Warming?
1 of 10

Ever since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. However, a new study shows that warmer temperatures may actually reduce the number of Atlantic hurricanes. Click through the photos to see other positive effects of global warming.

In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.

Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle.

What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.

He has warned about the harmful effects of climate change and has even complained in the past about being censored by the Bush administration on past studies on the dangers of global warming.

He said his new study, based on a computer model, argues “against the notion that we’ve already seen a really dramatic increase in Atlantic hurricane activity resulting from greenhouse warming.”

John McConnico, AP

Effects of
Global Warming
1 of 18

A record amount of Greenland’s ice sheet melted this summer — 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark. And for the first time on record, the Northwest Passage was open to navigation.

The study, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, predicts that by the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.

The number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States and its neighbors - anywhere east of Puerto Rico - will drop by 30 percent because of wind factors.

The biggest storms - those with winds of more than 110 mph - would only decrease in frequency by 8 percent. Tropical storms, those with winds between 39 and 73 mph, would decrease by 27 percent.

It’s not all good news from Knutson’s study, however. His computer model also forecasts that hurricanes and tropical storms will be wetter and fiercer. Rainfall within 30 miles of a hurricane should jump by 37 percent and wind strength should increase by about 2 percent, Knutson’s study says.

And Knutson said this study significantly underestimates the increase in wind strength. Some other scientists criticized his computer model.

MIT hurricane meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, while praising Knutson as a scientist, called his conclusion “demonstrably wrong” based on a computer model that doesn’t look properly at storms.

NASA

Historic Hurricanes
1 of 12

Hurricane Wilma in 2005 was the most intense hurricane ever. It measured 882 millibars, the lowest pressure on record. There were 27 named Atlantic storms that year, also a record.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist, said Knutson’s computer model is poor at assessing tropical weather and “fail to replicate storms with any kind of fidelity.”

Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said it is not just the number of hurricanes “that matter, it is also the intensity, duration and size, and this study falls short on these issues.”

Knutson acknowledges weaknesses in his computer model and said it primarily gives a coarse overview, not an accurate picture on individual storms and storm strength. He said the latest model doesn’t produce storms surpassing 112 mph.

But NOAA hurricane meteorologist Chris Landsea, who wasn’t part of this study, praised Knutson’s work as “very consistent with what’s being said all along.”

“I think global warming is a big concern, but when it comes to hurricanes the evidence for changes is pretty darn tiny,” Landsea said.

Hurricane season starts June 1 in the Atlantic and a Colorado State University forecast predicts about a 50 percent more active than normal storm season this year. NOAA puts out its own seasonal forecast on May 22.

In a normal year about 10 named storms form. Six become hurricanes and two become major hurricanes. On average, about five hurricanes hit the United States every three years.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2008-05-18 14:33:13