Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: This is global warming, says environmental chief (The Independent)

Dedicato al compianto loonie del bue e dell'asino...
Am.
 
*This is global warming, says environmental chief*
 As Hurricane Rita threatens devastation, scientist blames climate change
 By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
 Published: 23 September 2005
 Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the 
"smoking gun" of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists 
believes.
 The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New 
Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by 
climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission 
on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just 
as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising 
temperature of the sea, he said. "The increased intensity of these kinds 
of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming."
In a series of outspoken comments - a thinly veiled attack on the Bush 
administration, Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still 
deny the reality of climate change.
Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: "If this makes the 
climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good 
will come out of a truly awful situation." As he spoke, more than a 
million people were fleeing north away from the coast of Texas as Rita, 
one of the most intense storms on record, roared through the Gulf of 
Mexico. It will probably make landfall tonight or early tomorrow near 
Houston, America's fourth largest city and the centre of its oil 
industry. Highways leading inland from Houston were clogged with traffic 
for up to 100 miles north.
There are real fears that Houston could suffer as badly from Rita just 
as New Orleans suffered from Hurricane Katrina less than a month ago.
Asked what conclusion the Bush administration should draw from two 
hurricanes of such high intensity hitting the US in quick succession, 
Sir John said: "If what looks like is going to be a horrible mess causes 
the extreme sceptics about climate change in the US to reconsider their 
opinion, that would be an extremely valuable outcome."
Asked about characterising them as "loonies", he said: "There are a 
group of people in various parts of the world ... who simply don't want 
to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the 
climate."
"I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung 
cancer."
With his comments, Sir John becomes the third of the leaders of 
Britain's scientific establishment to attack the US over the Bush 
government's determination to cast doubt on global warming as a real 
phenomenon.
Sir John's comments follow and support recent research, much of it from 
America itself, showing that hurricanes are getting more violent and 
suggesting climate change is the cause.
A paper by US researchers, last week in the US journal Science, showed 
that storms of the intensity of Hurricane Katrina have become almost 
twice as common in the past 35 years.
Although the overall frequency of tropical storms worldwide has remained 
broadly level since 1970, the number of extreme category 4 and 5 events 
has sharply risen. In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 
category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year but, since 1990, they have nearly 
doubled to an average of about 18 a year. During the same period, sea 
surface temperatures, among the key drivers of hurricane intensity, have 
increased by an average of 0.5C (0.9F).
Sir John said: "Increasingly it looks like a smoking gun. It's a fair 
conclusion to draw that global warming, caused to a substantial extent 
by people, is driving increased sea surface temperatures and increasing 
the violence of hurricanes."

likely to be due to global warming."
"Very likely" :)
Risposta moooooolto scientifica :)
*LOL*
-Stefano