Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has added its weather forecasts to those of other agencies — 2007 is shaping up to be a busy year for hurricanes. The Pacific Ocean is cooling, the Atlantic is quite warm, according to this story in today’s Washington Post, and “the atmosphere is evolving toward what forecasters said yesterday could be a dangerous hurricane season.”

NOAA is predicting 13-17 named storms, 7-10 of them will be hurricanes, a handful of those potentially huge.

Remember what happened to oil supplies when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast? We are already at record gasoline prices, and now experts are warning the industry to stockpile oil reserves away from the US southeast. One expert quoted in this article says that disruption of production in the Gulf of Mexico this year is “almost certain.”

$5 per gallon gasoline, anybody?

This Reuters article, printed in today’s Wash. Post, also predicts where these storms are most likely to hit in the US this year. Watch out if you live along the coast of North Carolina, or in the Terrebonne Parish of Louisiana.

Global warming? Probably not the number of storms so much as their size and intensity. Warming Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico water temperatures mean a lot more energy to feed the storms when they do form.

Meanwhile, over across the ocean, Europeans are being warned of a very hot summer, with the potential of a repeat of the catastrophic heat wave that killed tens of thousands of people in 2003. The UK’s weather office put the chance of that at 1 in 8.

Is any of this weather and climate news changing anything in our human behavior? Well, not really, despite all the hype. A new study shows that we have accelerated the amount of CO2 that humans emit into the atmosphere since 2000, sadly at the high end of predictions. You can read about that in this Reuters wire story. Indeed, the increase of carbon emissions was three times the rate of the 1990s.

Meanwhile, just to cheer us up more, the US says that CO2 emissions will rise by 59% by from 2004-2030, largely due to the increase in coal-burning in China. The US is still the number one carbon emitter, but China will pass us soon.

This is another indication of how crucial it is that these two countries become active in international efforts to cut carbon emissions enough to keep the climate from destabilizing to the point of real catastrophe.

So, get prepared for a possibly difficult summer. And get active in the work to change the dangerous course we humans are on.

[tags] active hurricane season, NOAA, CO2 emissions, hot summer predicted[/tags]