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Sciene Tuesday - Hurricanes, Babies, Smoking, and Energy Efficiency
Will Warming Lead to a Rise in Hurricanes?
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
When people worry about the effects of global warming, they worry more about hurricanes than anything else. In surveys, almost three-quarters of Americans say there will be more and stronger hurricanes in a warming world. By contrast, fewer than one-quarter worry about increased coastal flooding.
But as far as the scientific consensus is concerned, people have things just about backward.
There is no doubt that as the world warms, seas will rise, increasing the flood risk, simply because warmer water occupies more space. (And if the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets melt, the rise will be far greater.)
It seems similarly logical that as the world warms, hurricanes will be more frequent or more powerful or both. After all, they draw their strength from warm ocean waters. But while many scientists hold this view, there is far less consensus, in part because of new findings on other factors that may work against stronger, more frequent storms.
“Global warming is as real as it gets,” Richard A. Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, said last month at a weather conference in the Bahamas, where most of the conversation focused on hurricanes. But as for its link to hurricanes, Mr. Anthes said, “I don’t think it’s been proved conclusively.”
In a consensus statement issued last year, the World Meteorological Organization said it was likely that there would be some increase in hurricane wind speeds in a warmer world. But the organization, which is the United Nations weather agency, noted that decades-long periods of high and low hurricane activity, unconnected to any climate change, had been recorded before. (Climate experts say a period of high activity began in 1995.)
Also, measurement techniques have greatly improved in recent decades, making it difficult to compare data and detect trends.
So as the annual hurricane season begins on June 1, scientists are pressing on a number of fronts to learn how hurricanes form and move, what factors limit or expand their lethal potential and how to tell with greater precision when and where they will strike.
Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate.
He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms, the most powerful, and concluded that their increased frequency since 1970 was “directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature,” which is increasing. They reported their findings in the journal Science.
Other experts challenge the idea that a warmer world means more and stronger storms.
For example, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Miami have been studying how vertical wind shear — the differences in wind direction or speed at different altitudes — can inhibit hurricane formation.
In work reported last month in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said that in a warming world, wind shear in the Atlantic would increase, possibly enough to cancel out the hurricane-forcing effects of warmer water.
Last week, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts reported in the journal Nature that periods of frequent storminess had occurred in the past, even though things were cooler than they are now. They also concluded that wind currents were a crucial factor.
But even these researchers call the question open. “This doesn’t settle the issue,” said Gabriel Vecchi, the lead author of the wind shear study and a research scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, N.J.
In February, researchers led by James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, recalibrated recent and early satellite data on hurricanes using information from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA archive in Asheville, N.C. They concluded that hurricane frequency had increased, but only in the Atlantic, possibly because temperatures there are chronically just about warm enough for storms; so even modest warming makes hurricanes more likely.
But when Christopher W. Landsea analyzed historical records of hurricane activity, he concluded that satellite observations and other new techniques had increased scientists’ ability to detect major storms, skewing the frequency data. Dr. Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, reported this conclusion this month in EOS, an electronic publication of the American Geophysical Union.
This kind of he-said-he-said debate often leads people to dismiss a subject as one about which nothing will ever be known with confidence. In fact, the give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape.
In the current debate over global warming and hurricanes, the problem is relatively new and the data are hard to obtain and analyze.
For example, atmospheric researchers are wrestling with an enormous amount of new data as they study factors that contribute to the formation and maintenance of the hurricane’s characteristic eye and the bands of wind and rain that howl around it.
They hope to use the data to better predict how strong hurricanes will be when they strike land. But the effort is complicated by the way storms gain or lose strength as they move over warm or cool water, and by the way their structures evolve.
The researchers studied the movement of air, moisture and heat energy as a hurricane’s inner eyewall degrades, and the way an outer band can move in to replace it. Baseing their conclusions on aircraft, satellite and ground observations during Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia and Rita in 2005, the researcher, led by Robert A. Houze Jr. of the University of Washington, reported their eyewall findings in the journal Science in March.
Forecasting storm tracks is easier, because they are generally determined by large-scale wind patterns that are relatively easy to observe by satellite and aircraft. But the ease of prediction is relative. Forecasters still worry, many of them obsessively, about the difficulty of providing landfall forecasts with few false alarms, in time for escape from threatened areas.
One question meteorologists and climate experts can answer quickly is an obvious one: What happened to the hurricane season of 2006? Viewed from the perspective of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, it was a bust (or a boon). Not a single hurricane struck the United States.
But last year a persistent Bermuda high, sitting unusually far out in the Atlantic, and air currents from an unexpected and quick-forming El Niño system, which developed in the Pacific in August, diminished the storms’ potential to strike the United States. As a result, it felt like a year with no storms, even though there were only slightly fewer named storms than average (9 instead of 11), about as many became hurricanes as on average (5 instead of 6) and, as in an ordinary year, 2 hurricanes with winds of more than 111 miles per hour, the standard for Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.
This year, we will probably not be so lucky, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said at a news conference last week. They said they expected 13 to 17 named storms this season, 7 to 10 of them hurricanes and 3 to 5 of them major storms. The first of the named storms, Andrea, formed off the southeast coast in mid-May, more than three weeks before the season’s official start. No matter what happens this year, and no matter how the debate over global warming and hurricanes is resolved, there is wide agreement that residents of the East and Gulf Coasts can expect harsh treatment from storms, possibly for decades.
So even scientists who disagree on the hurricane-and-warming question agree that people should be discouraged from putting themselves in harm’s way. In a statement issued at this time last year, Dr. Anthes, Dr. Emanuel, Dr. Landsea and other researchers said the main hurricane problem facing the United States was “the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal areas,” much of it subsidized by federal insurance and other programs.
“We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes,” the scientists added. “But the more urgent problem of our lemminglike march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention.”
This idea is nothing new. The United States Commission on Ocean Policy made the point in its 2004 report, and many scientists have long advocated for more and better coastal hazard mapping, building restrictions and other steps to discourage development in high-risk areas.
But as several NOAA officials noted at their news conference last week, 53 percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast.
The polling data on public perceptions about global warming were presented May 5 in a conference at the John F. Kennedy School of Government by Robert J. Blendon, executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program. The conference focused on looming crises in which governments and other institutions seem unwilling to act.
But anyone who listened to the NOAA news conference last week might be forgiven for concluding that it is already too late. Although Gerry Bell, a lead forecaster at the National Hurricane Center, and Xavier William Proenza, the center’s director, pointed with obvious pride to the agency’s ever-improving forecasting ability, and agency officials cited new disaster-planning efforts, they and others acknowledged that even the best forecasts could do little to prevent property damage in a major hurricane.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, said people living in vulnerable coastal areas should stockpile enough food and water to last at least 72 hours. “Your state and federal responders — they will not be there instantly when a hurricane arrives,” he said.
Observatory: For Babies and Language, Seeing Is Believing, Even Without Hearing
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
As any new parent will attest, babies are amazing. And to the list of remarkable things infants can do, here’s a new one: they can distinguish one language from another just by the sight of a talking face, not sound.
Whitney M. Weikum, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues made this discovery in tests of infants up to 8 months old from monolingual (English only) and bilingual (English and French) households.
The researchers showed silent videotapes of a bilingual speaker saying a sentence in French or English until the baby got bored and looked away. They followed that with a tape of the speaker saying the same sentence in the other language, and observed whether that caught the baby’s attention, indicating that the baby recognized a difference and was attracted to something new.
They report in the journal Science that 4- and 6-month-old infants from English-only households were able to tell that a different language was being spoken. Eight-month-old infants from English-only homes, however, were no longer able to discriminate between languages.
“They’re losing sensitivity to this” as they grow older, Ms. Weikum said. “There’s really no reason for them to hang on to this ability if they are only going to be learning one language.”
By contrast, 8-month-olds from bilingual households could still discriminate between languages.
It has been thought that visual cues like lip, cheek and head movements provide just redundant information for verbal communication. Auditory signals are much stronger, Ms. Weikum said, and transmit more cues for babies to pick up.
The research shows that infants have the power to process all kinds of cues. “From a very young age, they’re capable of taking in a lot of language information,” she said.
Similar experiments with adults have shown that they can use visual cues to discriminate between two languages if they know one of the languages. Ms. Weikum said the two findings suggested that infants became less sensitive to visual cues as they grew older but that at some point, through experience, adults regained this sensitivity.
Which Weaselly Rascal? Now Scientists Can ‘Dust’ for Prints and Find Out
Identifying a wild animal species by its tracks is easy, at least for those with training or experience. But a team of scientists has gone one better — they’ve figured out how to identify individuals of one species by analyzing its paw prints.
Carl J. Herzog of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, with researchers from the New York State Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and other groups, analyzed prints of fishers, a member of the weasel family, left in and around Adirondack State Park. The prints were obtained using soot-covered plates that the animal steps on before stepping on sticky paper.
Fisher prints are something like human fingerprints, though instead of ridges the fisher has tiny raised dots on its paw pads that form patterns. (There are enough similarities that scientists from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services were involved in the work.)
The researchers, whose work is being published in The Journal of Wildlife Management, found that each fisher’s patterns were different enough that the odds of encountering a similar pattern in another animal were very slight. They say the technique could be useful as a relatively inexpensive and noninvasive way to measure the abundance of certain endangered or threatened animals.
Tracking a Duck’s Travels Between Migrations: Dive, Eat, Drift and Repeat
Birds fly long distances to and from nesting sites, but they also make local trips — to escape predators, perhaps, or to find food. While scientists know a fair amount about bird migration, they know less about more run-of-the-mill flights.
A study led by David Pelletier of the University of Quebec at Rimouski aims to fill some of the knowledge gaps. His research on the common eider, a large sea duck that spends most of its time on water, shows that outside of migration, the bird doesn’t fly very much. What flights it makes are related to feeding (the ducks dive for mussels and other food).
The researchers implanted sensors in female ducks that recorded heart rate, pressure (for dive depth) and body angle. From the data and visual observations they were able to identify all the flights of the birds.
As reported in the journal Biology Letters, they found that the birds flew only for about 10 minutes per day. Flights were most frequent around sunrise and appeared related to diving frequency: the greatest amount of diving occurred in the two hours after sunrise.
The researchers suggested that the birds find good foraging grounds during the day, but when they rest at night ocean currents take them far away. So the first thing they do in the morning is fly off to find a new feeding ground.
Vital Signs: At Risk: Where Smokers Congregate Outside Bars, a Cloud Hovers
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
Now that smokers have been pushed out of many bars and restaurants to mill about the door, is it time to send them packing altogether?
A new study suggests that the haze produced by the crowds of outcasts puffing away may also affect the health of nonsmokers.
The findings, presented at a recent conference of the American Thoracic Society, are preliminary. The research, led by Luke Naeher of the University of Georgia, was intended mainly to help design more extensive study into whether the outdoor secondhand smoke poses a real risk.
But the early findings suggested that it could be a problem.
The researchers slogged into the heat of battle to conduct the study: summer weekends in Athens, Ga., a bustling college town with more than 100 pubs and restaurants.
Athens put a full ban on smoking in bars into effect in 2005, sending smokers into the warm air. On a busy night, the researchers said, there may be 40 to 50 smokers crammed together at any given time.
The researchers measured two components of secondhand smoke, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.
They tested the air in front of five locations, with and without smokers, on four days. The study found that the level of pollutants outside the bars and restaurants was elevated, even after controlling for carbon monoxide and particulates in the exhaust from passing motor vehicles.
The Energy Challenge: Efficiency, Not Just Alternatives, Is Promoted as an Energy Saver
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
WATERBURY, Vt. — Green Mountain Coffee Roasters makes a lot of money selling individual servings of ground coffee in white cups that are churned out by the millions from a hissing, clanking production line here. But it recently found a way to generate even greater profits from the operation that will require only a modest investment.
Spending $150 to $200 to install a more efficient blower to cool the laser that carves the date and batch number into each passing cup will cut Green Mountain’s annual electricity bill for each laser by about $200, says Paul Comey, its vice president for environmental affairs. That might not seem like much, except that the company has 40 such lasers, which it plans to upgrade this week.
Green Mountain Coffee was persuaded to undertake such improvements in efficiency through an unusual effort by the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, which is under contract with the state to find thousands of such energy savings.
Opportunities like this abound in the commercial and industrial sectors, requiring no new research or technology. But few places are doing an effective job of finding them, experts say.
Vermont is one that is. Similarly, New York committed itself to pushing its utilities to do the same when Gov. Eliot Spitzer said recently that his goal was to cut electricity demand by 15 percent from what it would otherwise have been in 2015. That implies holding demand almost steady.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting a lot of attention these days as a way to reduce the impact of energy use on the environment. But even enthusiastic supporters of alternative energy agree that the easiest way to cut carbon emissions and air pollution is to focus more on efficiency, less on pollution-free generation.
“Efficiency is the steak,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Renewables are the sizzle.”
At a recent conference on energy efficiency and investment strategy, Pedro Haas, an energy expert at McKinsey & Company, said his consulting firm recently asked people worldwide what payback time they would find acceptable before investing money to save energy.
One fourth of them said they would never spend any money to improve energy efficiency; 50 percent said they wanted to earn back the investment in two years or less.
“That means about 75 percent of the public will require economics that are just not there,” Mr. Haas said.
The alternative is to let utilities make the investment. James E. Rogers, the chief executive of Duke Energy, said he would like to persuade regulators to let his company invest in energy efficiency on customers’ premises, and receive a profit on those investments.
For example, if buying an extra-efficient air-conditioner costs an additional $1,000, a homeowner might hesitate, he said, but the utility would not. Duke would offer to pay for the device and collect a monthly fee as a return on the investment over time by adding a small charge to the electric bill.
It would also collect an additional amount from other ratepayers, but they would end up saving money over the longer run because the investments help hold down demand, lessening the need to build expensive new power plants, the thinking goes.
Ralph Cavanagh, an electricity expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that utility returns average 15 percent, and that the willingness of the utilities to invest in relatively low-return generation projects while customers ignore high-return efficiency investments was driving consumption 20 percent to 40 percent higher than it should be.
Mr. Rogers and other utility executives sometimes talk about “decoupling” electricity rates, to encourage utilities to help their customers save money. At present, most regulated utilities have their rates set by state officials by calculating how much money they would need for a fair rate of return, and dividing by the amount of electricity sold, to arrive at a price for each kilowatt-hour, or for a kilowatt of load. Spend dollars to make more power, and earn a return on that money; spend dollars to sell less, and watch your income fall.
The idea of decoupling peaked in the 1980s but after competition was introduced in the generating system, the idea lost favor. “We had those discussions 20 years ago, and we need to have them again,” said Diane Munns, the former chief utility regulator in Iowa, who now runs the retail energy services group at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of the investor-owned utilities.
But not everyone agrees. Money for such programs always comes from all electricity customers. In several states, industrial customers have argued that they should not be forced to subsidize investments in other factories that lower their competitors’ costs.
In Vermont, a different argument has carried the day. Cutting electric consumption at Green Mountain’s coffee roasting plant and hundreds of other places will eliminate the need to build some additional power plants, string transmission lines and fuel the plants.
The last few megawatts of power, from new generators and lines, is more expensive than the cost from existing plants and lines, so cutting growth in electricity demand also cuts high-cost supplies.
Nancy C. Floyd, co-founder and managing director of Nth Power, an investment banking firm that specializes in energy, said utilities may be best situated to promote efficiency because they already have a relationship with every building owner.
California has long enlisted utilities to help cut electricity use, partly by structuring rates so a customer’s last few kilowatt-hours are extremely expensive, raising the incentive to buy more efficient equipment. The state was a pioneer in giving utilities rate increases for spending money to improve the efficiency with which customers use electricity. California has another enforcer, the threat of repetition of recent blackouts.
Decoupling is not limited to electricity; Utah just began an experiment in decoupling natural gas rates.
Vermont took a different tack, hiring Vermont Energy Investment, doing business as Efficiency Vermont and describing itself as an “efficiency utility.” Some Vermont utilities were just too small to have effective efficiency programs, regulators said, and some did not have their hearts in the work.
But no matter what the attitude of the utility, in most places the traditional ways of making energy still turn out to be easier to do than to save it. William R. Prindle, the deputy director of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group in Washington, said that it was simpler to finance and build a new power plant than to find the thousands of places to invest in energy efficiency, even if the dollars buy more power through efficiency than through new generation.
But the incentives for energy efficiency are growing, experts say.
“When we started talking about this in 1990s in terms of energy efficiency versus coal energy, we were talking 4 cents a kilowatt-hour for coal, and 4 cents for energy efficiency,” said R. Neal Elliott, the industrial program director at the council. “Today we’re talking optimistically, without carbon taxes, 10 cents for coal. With carbon taxes, we may be talking 20 cents for coal.”
“And energy efficiency,” he said, “is still 4 cents or less.”
(I think I heard somewhere that if everyone in Dane County switched just one bulb in their home to a Compact Fluorescent that we would be able to shut down a coal burning power plant - *sigh*)
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
When people worry about the effects of global warming, they worry more about hurricanes than anything else. In surveys, almost three-quarters of Americans say there will be more and stronger hurricanes in a warming world. By contrast, fewer than one-quarter worry about increased coastal flooding.
But as far as the scientific consensus is concerned, people have things just about backward.
There is no doubt that as the world warms, seas will rise, increasing the flood risk, simply because warmer water occupies more space. (And if the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets melt, the rise will be far greater.)
It seems similarly logical that as the world warms, hurricanes will be more frequent or more powerful or both. After all, they draw their strength from warm ocean waters. But while many scientists hold this view, there is far less consensus, in part because of new findings on other factors that may work against stronger, more frequent storms.
“Global warming is as real as it gets,” Richard A. Anthes, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, said last month at a weather conference in the Bahamas, where most of the conversation focused on hurricanes. But as for its link to hurricanes, Mr. Anthes said, “I don’t think it’s been proved conclusively.”
In a consensus statement issued last year, the World Meteorological Organization said it was likely that there would be some increase in hurricane wind speeds in a warmer world. But the organization, which is the United Nations weather agency, noted that decades-long periods of high and low hurricane activity, unconnected to any climate change, had been recorded before. (Climate experts say a period of high activity began in 1995.)
Also, measurement techniques have greatly improved in recent decades, making it difficult to compare data and detect trends.
So as the annual hurricane season begins on June 1, scientists are pressing on a number of fronts to learn how hurricanes form and move, what factors limit or expand their lethal potential and how to tell with greater precision when and where they will strike.
Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate.
He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute of Technology analyzed the frequency of Category 4 and 5 storms, the most powerful, and concluded that their increased frequency since 1970 was “directly linked to the trend in sea-surface temperature,” which is increasing. They reported their findings in the journal Science.
Other experts challenge the idea that a warmer world means more and stronger storms.
For example, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Miami have been studying how vertical wind shear — the differences in wind direction or speed at different altitudes — can inhibit hurricane formation.
In work reported last month in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers said that in a warming world, wind shear in the Atlantic would increase, possibly enough to cancel out the hurricane-forcing effects of warmer water.
Last week, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts reported in the journal Nature that periods of frequent storminess had occurred in the past, even though things were cooler than they are now. They also concluded that wind currents were a crucial factor.
But even these researchers call the question open. “This doesn’t settle the issue,” said Gabriel Vecchi, the lead author of the wind shear study and a research scientist at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in Princeton, N.J.
In February, researchers led by James Kossin, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin, recalibrated recent and early satellite data on hurricanes using information from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA archive in Asheville, N.C. They concluded that hurricane frequency had increased, but only in the Atlantic, possibly because temperatures there are chronically just about warm enough for storms; so even modest warming makes hurricanes more likely.
But when Christopher W. Landsea analyzed historical records of hurricane activity, he concluded that satellite observations and other new techniques had increased scientists’ ability to detect major storms, skewing the frequency data. Dr. Landsea, a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center, reported this conclusion this month in EOS, an electronic publication of the American Geophysical Union.
This kind of he-said-he-said debate often leads people to dismiss a subject as one about which nothing will ever be known with confidence. In fact, the give and take is an example of the way scientists tug and haul at their own and others’ findings until a consensus takes shape.
In the current debate over global warming and hurricanes, the problem is relatively new and the data are hard to obtain and analyze.
For example, atmospheric researchers are wrestling with an enormous amount of new data as they study factors that contribute to the formation and maintenance of the hurricane’s characteristic eye and the bands of wind and rain that howl around it.
They hope to use the data to better predict how strong hurricanes will be when they strike land. But the effort is complicated by the way storms gain or lose strength as they move over warm or cool water, and by the way their structures evolve.
The researchers studied the movement of air, moisture and heat energy as a hurricane’s inner eyewall degrades, and the way an outer band can move in to replace it. Baseing their conclusions on aircraft, satellite and ground observations during Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia and Rita in 2005, the researcher, led by Robert A. Houze Jr. of the University of Washington, reported their eyewall findings in the journal Science in March.
Forecasting storm tracks is easier, because they are generally determined by large-scale wind patterns that are relatively easy to observe by satellite and aircraft. But the ease of prediction is relative. Forecasters still worry, many of them obsessively, about the difficulty of providing landfall forecasts with few false alarms, in time for escape from threatened areas.
One question meteorologists and climate experts can answer quickly is an obvious one: What happened to the hurricane season of 2006? Viewed from the perspective of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, it was a bust (or a boon). Not a single hurricane struck the United States.
But last year a persistent Bermuda high, sitting unusually far out in the Atlantic, and air currents from an unexpected and quick-forming El Niño system, which developed in the Pacific in August, diminished the storms’ potential to strike the United States. As a result, it felt like a year with no storms, even though there were only slightly fewer named storms than average (9 instead of 11), about as many became hurricanes as on average (5 instead of 6) and, as in an ordinary year, 2 hurricanes with winds of more than 111 miles per hour, the standard for Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.
This year, we will probably not be so lucky, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said at a news conference last week. They said they expected 13 to 17 named storms this season, 7 to 10 of them hurricanes and 3 to 5 of them major storms. The first of the named storms, Andrea, formed off the southeast coast in mid-May, more than three weeks before the season’s official start. No matter what happens this year, and no matter how the debate over global warming and hurricanes is resolved, there is wide agreement that residents of the East and Gulf Coasts can expect harsh treatment from storms, possibly for decades.
So even scientists who disagree on the hurricane-and-warming question agree that people should be discouraged from putting themselves in harm’s way. In a statement issued at this time last year, Dr. Anthes, Dr. Emanuel, Dr. Landsea and other researchers said the main hurricane problem facing the United States was “the ever-growing concentration of population and wealth in vulnerable coastal areas,” much of it subsidized by federal insurance and other programs.
“We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve much of the current controversy over the effect of climate change on hurricanes,” the scientists added. “But the more urgent problem of our lemminglike march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention.”
This idea is nothing new. The United States Commission on Ocean Policy made the point in its 2004 report, and many scientists have long advocated for more and better coastal hazard mapping, building restrictions and other steps to discourage development in high-risk areas.
But as several NOAA officials noted at their news conference last week, 53 percent of Americans live within 50 miles of a coast.
The polling data on public perceptions about global warming were presented May 5 in a conference at the John F. Kennedy School of Government by Robert J. Blendon, executive director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program. The conference focused on looming crises in which governments and other institutions seem unwilling to act.
But anyone who listened to the NOAA news conference last week might be forgiven for concluding that it is already too late. Although Gerry Bell, a lead forecaster at the National Hurricane Center, and Xavier William Proenza, the center’s director, pointed with obvious pride to the agency’s ever-improving forecasting ability, and agency officials cited new disaster-planning efforts, they and others acknowledged that even the best forecasts could do little to prevent property damage in a major hurricane.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, said people living in vulnerable coastal areas should stockpile enough food and water to last at least 72 hours. “Your state and federal responders — they will not be there instantly when a hurricane arrives,” he said.
Observatory: For Babies and Language, Seeing Is Believing, Even Without Hearing
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
As any new parent will attest, babies are amazing. And to the list of remarkable things infants can do, here’s a new one: they can distinguish one language from another just by the sight of a talking face, not sound.
Whitney M. Weikum, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, and colleagues made this discovery in tests of infants up to 8 months old from monolingual (English only) and bilingual (English and French) households.
The researchers showed silent videotapes of a bilingual speaker saying a sentence in French or English until the baby got bored and looked away. They followed that with a tape of the speaker saying the same sentence in the other language, and observed whether that caught the baby’s attention, indicating that the baby recognized a difference and was attracted to something new.
They report in the journal Science that 4- and 6-month-old infants from English-only households were able to tell that a different language was being spoken. Eight-month-old infants from English-only homes, however, were no longer able to discriminate between languages.
“They’re losing sensitivity to this” as they grow older, Ms. Weikum said. “There’s really no reason for them to hang on to this ability if they are only going to be learning one language.”
By contrast, 8-month-olds from bilingual households could still discriminate between languages.
It has been thought that visual cues like lip, cheek and head movements provide just redundant information for verbal communication. Auditory signals are much stronger, Ms. Weikum said, and transmit more cues for babies to pick up.
The research shows that infants have the power to process all kinds of cues. “From a very young age, they’re capable of taking in a lot of language information,” she said.
Similar experiments with adults have shown that they can use visual cues to discriminate between two languages if they know one of the languages. Ms. Weikum said the two findings suggested that infants became less sensitive to visual cues as they grew older but that at some point, through experience, adults regained this sensitivity.
Which Weaselly Rascal? Now Scientists Can ‘Dust’ for Prints and Find Out
Identifying a wild animal species by its tracks is easy, at least for those with training or experience. But a team of scientists has gone one better — they’ve figured out how to identify individuals of one species by analyzing its paw prints.
Carl J. Herzog of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, with researchers from the New York State Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society Canada and other groups, analyzed prints of fishers, a member of the weasel family, left in and around Adirondack State Park. The prints were obtained using soot-covered plates that the animal steps on before stepping on sticky paper.
Fisher prints are something like human fingerprints, though instead of ridges the fisher has tiny raised dots on its paw pads that form patterns. (There are enough similarities that scientists from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services were involved in the work.)
The researchers, whose work is being published in The Journal of Wildlife Management, found that each fisher’s patterns were different enough that the odds of encountering a similar pattern in another animal were very slight. They say the technique could be useful as a relatively inexpensive and noninvasive way to measure the abundance of certain endangered or threatened animals.
Tracking a Duck’s Travels Between Migrations: Dive, Eat, Drift and Repeat
Birds fly long distances to and from nesting sites, but they also make local trips — to escape predators, perhaps, or to find food. While scientists know a fair amount about bird migration, they know less about more run-of-the-mill flights.
A study led by David Pelletier of the University of Quebec at Rimouski aims to fill some of the knowledge gaps. His research on the common eider, a large sea duck that spends most of its time on water, shows that outside of migration, the bird doesn’t fly very much. What flights it makes are related to feeding (the ducks dive for mussels and other food).
The researchers implanted sensors in female ducks that recorded heart rate, pressure (for dive depth) and body angle. From the data and visual observations they were able to identify all the flights of the birds.
As reported in the journal Biology Letters, they found that the birds flew only for about 10 minutes per day. Flights were most frequent around sunrise and appeared related to diving frequency: the greatest amount of diving occurred in the two hours after sunrise.
The researchers suggested that the birds find good foraging grounds during the day, but when they rest at night ocean currents take them far away. So the first thing they do in the morning is fly off to find a new feeding ground.
Vital Signs: At Risk: Where Smokers Congregate Outside Bars, a Cloud Hovers
By ERIC NAGOURNEY, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
Now that smokers have been pushed out of many bars and restaurants to mill about the door, is it time to send them packing altogether?
A new study suggests that the haze produced by the crowds of outcasts puffing away may also affect the health of nonsmokers.
The findings, presented at a recent conference of the American Thoracic Society, are preliminary. The research, led by Luke Naeher of the University of Georgia, was intended mainly to help design more extensive study into whether the outdoor secondhand smoke poses a real risk.
But the early findings suggested that it could be a problem.
The researchers slogged into the heat of battle to conduct the study: summer weekends in Athens, Ga., a bustling college town with more than 100 pubs and restaurants.
Athens put a full ban on smoking in bars into effect in 2005, sending smokers into the warm air. On a busy night, the researchers said, there may be 40 to 50 smokers crammed together at any given time.
The researchers measured two components of secondhand smoke, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.
They tested the air in front of five locations, with and without smokers, on four days. The study found that the level of pollutants outside the bars and restaurants was elevated, even after controlling for carbon monoxide and particulates in the exhaust from passing motor vehicles.
The Energy Challenge: Efficiency, Not Just Alternatives, Is Promoted as an Energy Saver
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, May 29, 2007
WATERBURY, Vt. — Green Mountain Coffee Roasters makes a lot of money selling individual servings of ground coffee in white cups that are churned out by the millions from a hissing, clanking production line here. But it recently found a way to generate even greater profits from the operation that will require only a modest investment.
Spending $150 to $200 to install a more efficient blower to cool the laser that carves the date and batch number into each passing cup will cut Green Mountain’s annual electricity bill for each laser by about $200, says Paul Comey, its vice president for environmental affairs. That might not seem like much, except that the company has 40 such lasers, which it plans to upgrade this week.
Green Mountain Coffee was persuaded to undertake such improvements in efficiency through an unusual effort by the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, which is under contract with the state to find thousands of such energy savings.
Opportunities like this abound in the commercial and industrial sectors, requiring no new research or technology. But few places are doing an effective job of finding them, experts say.
Vermont is one that is. Similarly, New York committed itself to pushing its utilities to do the same when Gov. Eliot Spitzer said recently that his goal was to cut electricity demand by 15 percent from what it would otherwise have been in 2015. That implies holding demand almost steady.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are getting a lot of attention these days as a way to reduce the impact of energy use on the environment. But even enthusiastic supporters of alternative energy agree that the easiest way to cut carbon emissions and air pollution is to focus more on efficiency, less on pollution-free generation.
“Efficiency is the steak,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. “Renewables are the sizzle.”
At a recent conference on energy efficiency and investment strategy, Pedro Haas, an energy expert at McKinsey & Company, said his consulting firm recently asked people worldwide what payback time they would find acceptable before investing money to save energy.
One fourth of them said they would never spend any money to improve energy efficiency; 50 percent said they wanted to earn back the investment in two years or less.
“That means about 75 percent of the public will require economics that are just not there,” Mr. Haas said.
The alternative is to let utilities make the investment. James E. Rogers, the chief executive of Duke Energy, said he would like to persuade regulators to let his company invest in energy efficiency on customers’ premises, and receive a profit on those investments.
For example, if buying an extra-efficient air-conditioner costs an additional $1,000, a homeowner might hesitate, he said, but the utility would not. Duke would offer to pay for the device and collect a monthly fee as a return on the investment over time by adding a small charge to the electric bill.
It would also collect an additional amount from other ratepayers, but they would end up saving money over the longer run because the investments help hold down demand, lessening the need to build expensive new power plants, the thinking goes.
Ralph Cavanagh, an electricity expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that utility returns average 15 percent, and that the willingness of the utilities to invest in relatively low-return generation projects while customers ignore high-return efficiency investments was driving consumption 20 percent to 40 percent higher than it should be.
Mr. Rogers and other utility executives sometimes talk about “decoupling” electricity rates, to encourage utilities to help their customers save money. At present, most regulated utilities have their rates set by state officials by calculating how much money they would need for a fair rate of return, and dividing by the amount of electricity sold, to arrive at a price for each kilowatt-hour, or for a kilowatt of load. Spend dollars to make more power, and earn a return on that money; spend dollars to sell less, and watch your income fall.
The idea of decoupling peaked in the 1980s but after competition was introduced in the generating system, the idea lost favor. “We had those discussions 20 years ago, and we need to have them again,” said Diane Munns, the former chief utility regulator in Iowa, who now runs the retail energy services group at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade association of the investor-owned utilities.
But not everyone agrees. Money for such programs always comes from all electricity customers. In several states, industrial customers have argued that they should not be forced to subsidize investments in other factories that lower their competitors’ costs.
In Vermont, a different argument has carried the day. Cutting electric consumption at Green Mountain’s coffee roasting plant and hundreds of other places will eliminate the need to build some additional power plants, string transmission lines and fuel the plants.
The last few megawatts of power, from new generators and lines, is more expensive than the cost from existing plants and lines, so cutting growth in electricity demand also cuts high-cost supplies.
Nancy C. Floyd, co-founder and managing director of Nth Power, an investment banking firm that specializes in energy, said utilities may be best situated to promote efficiency because they already have a relationship with every building owner.
California has long enlisted utilities to help cut electricity use, partly by structuring rates so a customer’s last few kilowatt-hours are extremely expensive, raising the incentive to buy more efficient equipment. The state was a pioneer in giving utilities rate increases for spending money to improve the efficiency with which customers use electricity. California has another enforcer, the threat of repetition of recent blackouts.
Decoupling is not limited to electricity; Utah just began an experiment in decoupling natural gas rates.
Vermont took a different tack, hiring Vermont Energy Investment, doing business as Efficiency Vermont and describing itself as an “efficiency utility.” Some Vermont utilities were just too small to have effective efficiency programs, regulators said, and some did not have their hearts in the work.
But no matter what the attitude of the utility, in most places the traditional ways of making energy still turn out to be easier to do than to save it. William R. Prindle, the deputy director of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, a nonprofit group in Washington, said that it was simpler to finance and build a new power plant than to find the thousands of places to invest in energy efficiency, even if the dollars buy more power through efficiency than through new generation.
But the incentives for energy efficiency are growing, experts say.
“When we started talking about this in 1990s in terms of energy efficiency versus coal energy, we were talking 4 cents a kilowatt-hour for coal, and 4 cents for energy efficiency,” said R. Neal Elliott, the industrial program director at the council. “Today we’re talking optimistically, without carbon taxes, 10 cents for coal. With carbon taxes, we may be talking 20 cents for coal.”
“And energy efficiency,” he said, “is still 4 cents or less.”
(I think I heard somewhere that if everyone in Dane County switched just one bulb in their home to a Compact Fluorescent that we would be able to shut down a coal burning power plant - *sigh*)