Monthly Archives: August 2005

hurricanes and climate change

The question of hurricanes and their relationship to climate change (“global warming”) has come up a few times recently, so I’m making a few notes here:

“Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years”:http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature03906.html,
(abstract) from Nature.

“The links between hurricanes and climate change”:http://www.ucsusa.org/global_environment/global_warming/page.cfm?pageID=1529,
from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It certainly looks like the models of cyclone strength as related to sea surface temperature are well developed and useful in predicting future trends. I personally think they provide enough support for a causal link meme, namely “these storms are getting worse because of global warming”, even if that meme gets oversimplified in transmission.

nanotube sheets

It looks like the field of nanotubes in the 21st century is looking as fertile as that of plastics in the 20th. The latest breakthrough is “nanotube sheets”:http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8976160/, super-strong super-thin sheets with a whole list of promising applications. (Think “space elevator”:http://www.spaceelevator.com/, but that’s just one of them.)