I had mentioned this problem here before and got eviscerated by the neocon posters who just don't want to believe that changes in U.S. environmental policy is essential to avoid a world-wide economic and environmental disaster:

Monday, August 1, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM

Scientist links global warming to rising ferocity of hurricanes

By Martin Merzer
Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI — The accumulated power of hurricanes has more than doubled in the past 30 years, with a particularly dramatic spike since 1995, and global warming likely is a major cause, according to a study to be published this week.

The report by Kerry Emanuel, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the first to draw a statistical relationship between global warming and hurricane ferocity. He reviewed about five decades of data on hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific.

"The large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effect of global warming," Emanuel wrote in a study that is to be published Thursday in the journal Nature. Copies of the article were made available yesterday.

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