Is Katrina just a precursor of things to come? (page 2)

mrsjones5

Katrina is just an example of a living earth.

foreword

hehe, early morning thoughts, uggh

Thank god I can still afford coffee....

Black Sheep

Is Katrina just a precursor of things to come?

Before jumping to conclusions based on predictions from any organisations with a penchant for scaring the bejeesus out of us, it would be wise to review events of the past.

I recommend the National Hurricane Center's archive of past hurrican seasons at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastall.shtml

TresHappy

I heard this from one of my tree hugging friends in San Francisco: that every time we send up a shuttle, part of the ozone is destroyed upon re-entry? Could someone please verify that?

Shuttle vs. ozone: does the space shuttle help destroy the fragile ozone layer? Omni, July, 1994 by James Oberg new Save a personal copy of this article and quickly find it again with Furl.net. It's free! Save it.

Little more than a decade ago, most people had no idea what the ozone layer was. How times have changed. Now, ordinary citizens all over the world argue over theories purporting to explain what causes a hole to appear in the ozone each year. For better or worse, the ozone layer has become a part of popular culture.

One of the negative aspects to this phenomenon is that one need only invoke the ozone layer to draw intense scrutiny to something. Such scrutiny has recently fallen upon the U.S. space shuttle program.

Flights of the space shuttle, the U.S. Delta, Scout, and Titan rockets, and the French Ariane V rocket are destroying the ozone layer, claimed Soviet scientists Valery Burdakov and Vyacheslave Filin several years ago. In parallel, Soviet space official Aleksandr Dunayev wrote that "300 launches of the shuttle a year would be a catastrophe, and the ozone layer would be completely destroyed." By comparison, the Soviets' Energiya rocket is "ecologically the cleanest," the scientists stated. Coincidentally, at about the same time, the Soviets began soliciting bids from other countries for the Energiya's services.

The Soviets have hardly been alone in decrying the perceived danger to the planet of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters, which in the first two minutes of each launch spew tons of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. Antimilitary activist Helen Caldicott has spoken out against the shuttle, saying that "with each launch, one quarter of 1 percent of the ozone is destroyed. So far, the space shuttle has destroyed 10 percent of the ozone." In 1991, well-known activist Michio Kaku, a professor of nuclear physics at the City University of New York, wrote in The Guardian that "solid-fueled rockets emit large quantities of harmful hydrochloric acid, which can rapidly deplete the fragile ozone layer."

mrsjones5

Most of these claims have turned out to have little scientific basis. The ozone layer isn't a bricklike wall to be chipped away one layer at a time. Rather, it's a chemically dynamic region where chlorine ions--not hydrochloric acid--cause ozone molecules to convert to ordinary oxygen molecules while incoming ultraviolet radiation causes ozone to form again.

As for the Soviet scientists' allegations, they based their claims on a series of explicitly worst-case scenarios. They assumed that all the shuttle exhaust gets deposited in the ozone layer. Actually, only a small percentage of it does, while rain washes out most of it. They assumed that all the chlorine gets converted into ozone-destroying ions, although only a fraction ever does. And they assumed that the 300 flights they warned of would occur in a period of less than one year so that little natural regeneration would take place. NASA isn't ever likely to launch the shuttle more than ten times a year, and by the time each flight occurs, the minor damage from the last flight has disappeared.

In response to concern about this issue, aerospace experts held workshops recently to assess the dimensions of the threat. A panel from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics concluded that compared to other manmade sources of ozone-depleting chemicals, the effects of rocket launchings were small enough to pose no serious threat. In the future, however, new rockets must use cleaner fuels. "No matter how small the environmental effects of rockets are," noted AIAA aerospace and science-policy director Jerry Grey, "we can reduce them." Representatives of the Federation of American Scientists, an environmentally sensitive lobbying group, agreed with this assessment.

Sadly, these cleaner fuels remain far in the future. NASA engineers considered and rejected liquid-fueled boosters when designing the shuttle. All-liquid systems would be more expensive and unreliable than solid-fueled systems and, they decided, offered few if any safety advantages.

stillajwexelder

YOU are looking at these events on Human Timescales -looked at from geological time scales and nothing has changed since the earth began

talesin

stilla,

Many scientists feel we have sped up the timetable. What you say is true, but I feel there are nuances you have left out.

t

Leolaia

From what I've read, the strength and frequency of hurricanes will increase over the next 20 years, and global warming will likely be a contributing factor by increasing the warmth of the Atlantic/Caribbean waters that power the storms. However, it is not the only factor, as there are other things like water salinity that affect the strength of hurriances, and it was already predicted on the basis of the usual hurricane cycle that hurriances were going to increase in strength anyway over the next 20 years to at least the strength they were in the 1920s-1940s, such as the Category 5 hurricane of 1935 that struck the Florida Keys or the Category 4 storm from 1928 that struck, among other things, Lake Okeechobee in Florida which burst a levee and killed thousands. Before this, there are also the 1900 Category 5 hurricane that hit Galveston Texas and killed about 8,000-12,000 people. The present cycle however may be worse because of the additional factor of global warming.

For the doomsayers who believe this period of hurricane activity is unprecedented in the history of the world and a "sign" of the end, they should bear in mind that there are longer range cycles of hurricanes and there have been periods of hurricane activity in history far worse than any on record. For example, evidence of past hurricane storm surges are recoverable in core samples:

Kam-biu Liu, a geology professor at Louisiana State University, discovered ocean sand in core samples from inland lakes on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. From these samples, Liu concluded that extremely powerful hurricanes battered the Gulf Coast and dumped the sand into the lakes.
Liu thinks the core samples indicate that hurricanes that would be considered catastrophic by modern standards were regularly battering the Gulf Coast thousands of years ago.
From about 3,400 years ago to about 1,000 years ago, the Gulf Coast was hit repeatedly by very powerful hurricanes, Liu said. The frequency of hits increases by three to five times more than today.
The ancient Maya Indians—who had their heyday in Mexico and Central America from about A.D. 250 to 900—had more than a passing familiarity with the tempests that regularly howled off the Atlantic. They called their god of storms Hurukan, and it's likely that our term for the storms evolved from this name.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0128_050128_tv_hurricane_2.html

professor

I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic "professor"

I wasn't. You are right about global warming.

Is Katrina just a precursor of things to come?

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