Publication: Daily Nation
Paper Section And Page: 17A
Paper Date: Wed, Apr 25, 2001
Byline: Compiled by Terry Ally
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Page sponsored by The Tourism Development Corporation |
Should Barbadians fear that global warming would heat up the Tropics and lead to a greater number of and stronger hurricanes in coming years?
Professor of meteorology at the Massachussettes Institute of Technology, Boston, Dr Kerry Emanuel, thinks that there should be no impact from global warming in the next three decades. Speaking at the closing session of the National Hurricane Conference in Washington DC, he addressed the issue while examining the following two issues:
One theory is that as sea surface temperatures increase, the maximum winds of hurricanes would also increase and it is a theory with which Emanuel agrees.
"We can say fairly unequivocally that if, for some reason, the global surface temperature rises that you have to export more entropy to space and it means more frictional dissipation and more storminess," said the professor, who has contributed prolificaly to hurricane research.
He said that if the temperature of the tropical oceans were to increase from 30¼ Celsius to 32.2¼ Celsius, then the maximum winds would be ten per cent stronger or about 20 miles per hour. Tropical ocean temperatures have risen three-tenths of a degree and this should translate into upper wind speeds of one knot (1.15 miles). But Emanuel said this had not been discernible because wind speeds were measured to the nearest five knots (5.75 miles).
"I want to emphasise a point that I can't emphasise enough: the natural variability of hurricane activity, particularly in the Atlantic Ocean, is so large that for the next 30 years or so, even in dramatic global warming scenarios, that natural variability would swamp anything we would expect to see as a result of global warming," he told the conference.
Frequency of hurricanes is another kettle of fish, because little is known about what controls the frequency in the present climate and more work needs to be done, he said. The new field of paleotempestology attempts to reconstruct long-term hurricane records from the geological record. Researchers at Louisiana State University have discovered that between 1 000 to 3 000 years ago there were a great number of strong hurricanes hitting the Gulf of Mexico, but not many before and after that period.
He also dispelled one notion that if a greater portion of the ocean heated up to 26.5º Celsius or higher then hurricanes would expand to those areas.
"That is wrong. There is nothing magic about 26.5¡ and if you raise global temperature then that threshold goes up too. We do not expect minor climate change to dramatically change the area covered by tropical cyclones."
Emanuel said that after a hurricane moved through the Tropics, the sea surface actually cooled and warmed up again in two weeks.
It is believed, he said, that over the period of a year hurricanes dumped an average of 10 000 million megawatts of energy into the ocean of which between 1 000 to 2 000 million megawatts were transferred to the North Pole - enough energy to power all of the United States for seven months.
"It means if you try to warm the climate, the increased poleward transport by the ocean would cool the Tropics and warm the higher latitudes and this would export climate sensitivity out of the Tropics to higher latitudes and make the Tropics fairly stable to global climate change."
BARBADOS Bottling Company's (BBC) newest 24-pocket, half-litre crates for glass bottles are the company's latest environmentally friendly product.
Can plastic be environmentally friendly? Yes. If it is recycled. And that is exactly what BBC did.
When the company started phasing out its six-pocket crates for two-litre bottles, it ended up with over 13 tons of plastic which was a lot of garbage for the Mangrove Pond Landfill. So the company entered negotiations with the Trinidadian firm century ESLON which agreed to purchase the high density polyethlene (HDPE) residue of the ground crates and use it to produce the new 24-pocket, half-litre crates.
General manager Dan Stoute said efforts would continue until all existing out-of-service, six-pocket crates had been recycled.
LAST week's Green Page was dedicated to Earth Day which was marked on Sunday, April 22, with the theme: Energy And Climate. All the articles which appeared on the Green Page last week were written by the Barbados-based Caribbean Planning for Adaptation to Climate Change.