– Initial Conditions for the 2006 Atlantic Hurricane Season
In 2005, by contrast, the entire hurricane-prone section of the Atlantic was much warmer than average. In fact, at the opening of the 2006 hurricane season, sea surface temperatures were 2 degrees cooler than they had been at opening of the 2005 season, said Adamec. The warm temperatures in 2005 allowed a record seven storms to form by the end of July. (Link to temperature maps)
The other major difference between conditions in 2005 and conditions in 2006 is the position of the Bermuda High, a semi-permanent high-pressure system that sits over the Central Atlantic. Hurricanes that form in the Atlantic tend to circle the Bermuda High. In 2004 and 2005, the Bermuda High expanded to the south and west, pushing storms into the Gulf of Mexico and Florida. But as of May 31, 2006, the Bermuda High remained small and in a position that would steer storms up the East Coast of the United States or out into the Atlantic.
Category: News
Jordan – Palestinian State
Backward reels the news — The Washington Times
Israel’s unspoken ulterior motive, which Jordan’s King Abdullah and ranking officials know all too well, is to make Jordan the Palestinian state, leaving what’s left of the West Bank as a sort of no-man’s-land buffer between the two countries. While Mr. Sharon was still prime minister, he suggested to King Abdullah he resume responsibility for the West Bank, which was Jordan’s mandate prior to the 1967 war.
King Abdullah understood, as his late father King Hussein did, this would be the first step in a geostrategic gambit to turn Jordan into a full-fledged Palestinian state. Continue reading “Jordan – Palestinian State”
Why Ann Coulter Matters
TIME.com: Viewpoint: Why Ann Coulter Matters
The same day I was reading Ann Coulter’s book, I read Margaret Talbot’s excellent New Yorker piece from last week on Oriana Fallaci, the Coulteresque Italian journalist who is not intimidated by the
“penitential narcissism that makes the West guilty of even that which victimizes it.” She has written that the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Fallaci has said that Muslims “breed like rats,”
As it happens, it’s illegal in much of Europe to say such outlandish things: Fallaci currently faces trial in Italy for defaming Islam. At least in the U.S., Coulter is not threatened with prosecution for being Coulter, but as I read Talbot’s piece I wondered why the de rigueur intellectual response to Coulter in the U.S. is to dismiss her automatically. 
America’s obsession with loving or hating Coulter is a psychological phenomenon almost unique in our culture. Her various epigones on Fox News can’t quite match her ability to induce people to take deeply seriously what is obvious satire. I’m not saying Coulter doesn’t believe what she says — if you talk with her mother, who’s even more conservative, you’ll know that she does — but she knows that outrage is the blunt cousin of argument, that irony is more accessible than a thousand position papers. She knows that saying what no one else would dare to say will get her attention.
Why Zarqawi’s death matters
Why Zarqawi’s death matters. By Christopher Hitchens
That bomb at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, for example, was no improvised explosive device. It was a huge charge of military-grade ordnance. Are we to believe that a newly arrived Bedouin Jordanian thug could so swiftly have scraped acquaintance with senior-level former Baathists? (The charges that destroyed the golden dome of the Shiites in Samarra were likewise rigged and set by professional military demolitionists.)
Zarqawi was all along receiving help from the mullahs in Iran. He certainly seems to have been able to transit their territory (Herat is on the Iranian border with Afghanistan) and to replenish his forces by the same route. If this suggestive connection is proved, as Weaver suggests it will be, then we have the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran directly sponsoring the murderer of their co-religionists in Iraq.
And the Atlantic Magazine Cover Story that this article refers to about:How a video-store clerk and small-time crook reinvented himself as America’s nemesis in Iraq
Ignoring Bejing’s Directives
Economist.com
Local leaders rarely incur heavy political penalties for failing to carry out the central government’s economic directives. Officials in Beijing frequently order clampdowns on the makers of pirated goods. Offending factories are sometimes closed. But local officials who condone such operations as a way of boosting their local economies are seldom punished. Nor are officials who turn a blind eye to polluting industries, unless they cause big accidents or trigger unrest. Transgressions are so widespread that it would be destabilising to launch a crackdown. But just to make sure that career-damaging information does not reach Beijing, local governments often arrest petitioners who travel to the capital to raise complaints.
Central leaders are comforted by the knowledge that direct political challenges to their authority by local governments are extremely rare. Li Fan, an independent consultant in Beijing who advises local governments on election-related issues, says there is strong demand among lower-level officials for political reform. But very few rural townships have pushed experiments with freer elections or more open government beyond the party’s guidelines. And none has tolerated organised opposition or open attacks on the party leadership. China’s local leaders know where to draw the line.
Record meteorite hit Norway
Record meteorite hit Norway – Aftenposten.no
Astronomers were excited by the news.
“There were ground tremors, a house shook and a curtain was blown into the house,” Norway’s best known astronomer Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard told Aftenposten.no.
Røed Ødegaard said the meteorite was visible to an area of several hundred kilometers despite the brightness of the midnight sunlit summer sky. The meteorite hit a mountainside in Reisadalen in North Troms.
Wind-Power Projects Halted
Wind-Power Projects Halted
More than 130 wind turbines are proposed for the hilltops of central Wisconsin, but that project and at least 11 others have been halted by the Defense Department as it studies whether the projects could interfere with military radar.
Wind farm developers, Midwestern legislators and environmentalists say the farms pose no risk, noting that there are already numerous wind farms operating in military radar areas. They say a renewable, domestic source of energy such as wind is crucial to energy security and independence.
They say their wind turbines are victims of the ongoing dispute between Cape Cod residents and developers of the proposed Cape Wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The Defense Department study was put in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act — inserted, say wind farm developers, by senators who want to block Cape Wind.
Andean Blues
Andean Blues
On Sunday morning, I went to vote in Barranco, my old neighborhood. I voted for Garcia, the lesser of two evils because not voting or casting a blank vote would have helped Humala. Garcia, now a moderate populist who says he does not want to break away from globalization, won with roughly 53 percent of the vote against Humala’s 47 percent.
In the 1960s, American historian Carroll Quigley explained in “The Evolution of Civilizations” that decadence starts when social arrangements that serve social needs turn into institutions that serve their own needs.
That, precisely, is part of Latin America’s plight. The disconnect between official institutions and social needs — the legacy of too many caudillos and the absence of the rule of law — has thrown many people into the hands of leaders who espouse nationalist ideologies. The challenge is to heal the rift, not to widen it as Humala was planning to do.
‘Hope for coral’ as oceans warm
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | ‘Hope for coral’ as oceans warm
Some coral associate only with one type of symbiotic algae, or zooxanthellae.
Others are more promiscuous, and it has been thought for some time that these may be able to switch to more heat-tolerant varieties as waters warm – a theory which the new Australian research apparently confirms.
Scientists took samples of Acropora millepora, a common Great Barrier Reef coral, and transplanted them from cooler to warmer waters by taking them to locations further north along the reef.
Some of the transplanted populations responded by taking on algal varieties able to tolerate higher temperatures.
Scientists transplanted coral between islands on the Barrier Reef
These populations developed the ability to tolerate even higher temperatures generated by heating sea water artificially in the laboratory.
Report Claims Over-Fishing as Major Threat
Report Claims Over-Fishing as Major Threat | Outside Online
(Picture is of a giant piece of 500 year old gorgonian coral being hoisted out of a bottom trawl net.) Specifically, World Wildlife Fund spokesman Tom Lalley, cited the legal practice of bottom-trawling as a culprit in the practice of over fishing. The practice, Lalley said, involves scraping “the bottom of the sea clean,” and heavily damaging to the marine environment.
The report, released ahead of meeting in New York for the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement, cites an over-capacity of authorized fleets, over-fishing of stocks under catch limits and the absence of rebuilding strategies for depleted populations, Reuters reported.
“What it’s saying is the current governance structure has failed,” Lalley said. Citing the bluefin tuna and orange roughy as examples of over-exploited species, Lalley said the purpose of the report was to identify weaknesses and to improve the current regulatory system.