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Sandy is the 19th named storm this season, there were 19 last year and 19 the year before.

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One of the major unanswered questions about climate change is whether hurricanes have become more frequent and stronger as the world has warmed. Until now, there hasn’t been enough evidence to settle the question, but a report published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may have changed all that. Using an entirely new method of tallying hurricane power and frequency, a team of scientists say that hurricanes are, indeed, more of a danger when ocean temperatures are higher. “In particular, we estimate that Katrina-magnitude events have been twice as frequent in warm years compared with cold years," the report says.

Until now, the problem with such calculations is that until satellites came along in the 1970’s, nobody knew for sure how many hurricanes formed during a given year. That’s because some hurricanes never strike land, and unless a ship or a plane happened upon one of these storms, nobody might even know it had ever existed, and certainly not how strong it was

The record from the '70's onward is much more complete — but since hurricane numbers wax and wane based on a natural cycle, that’s not long enough to see if there’s a warming-related pattern on top of ordinary fluctuations. Ocean temperatures fluctuate according to natural cycles as well, although studies have shown an overall increase in North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, a trend that has been linked to manmade global warming.

But Alex Grinsted of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues came at the problem in an entirely different way. They looked not at hurricanes themselves, but at the storm surges tropical storms drive before them as they come ashore, and surges have been reliably measured by devices known as tide gauges all the way back to the 1920's.

“Using surges as an indicator,” Grinsted said in an interview, “we see an increase in all magnitudes of storms when ocean temperatures are warmer.” As ocean temperatures have risen inexorably higher in the general warming of the planet due to human greenhouse-gas emissions, the scientists concluded, hurricane numbers have moved upward as well. The implication: they’ll keep increasing along with global temperatures unless emissions are cut significantly.

There’s one obvious caveat about the new results: not every hurricane creates a storm surge, since they don’t always hit land. And not every storm surge is caused by a hurricane. “The storm surge index,” Grinsted said, “is sensitive to strong winter storms as well.” And it’s quite possible, he said, that the intensity of a given storm surge could be made greater or less by the angle at which a hurricane hits land.

Surges aren’t, in short, a perfect stand-in for hurricanes, but Grinsted said that they’re pretty good. In cases where they could do so, the team has lined up hurricane data with surge data, and, he said, “there are clear correlations. So while our paper might not explain everything, it is still useful."

In fact, Grinsted said, storm surges are more relevant to peoples’ lives than hurricanes. “Surges are one of the most damaging aspects of hurricanes,” and that’s going to become increasingly true as sea level continues to rise over the rest of this century. “If we want to talk about threat and risk, then this could be a more important measure,” Grinsted said.

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The people of East Africa once again face a devastating drought this year: Crops wither and fail from Kenya to Ethiopia, livestock drop dead and famine spreads. Although, historically, such droughts are not uncommon in this region, their frequency seems to have increased in recent years, raising prices for staple foods, such as maize.

This scenario may simply be a taste of a world undergoing climate change in the mid–21st century, according to a new report from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington, D.C.–based organization seeking an end to hunger and poverty through appropriate local, national and international agricultural policies. By IFPRI's estimate, 25 million more children will be malnourished in 2050 due to the impact of climate change on global agriculture.

"Higher temperatures and changes in precipitation result in pressure on yields from important crops in much of the world," says IFPRI agricultural economist Gerald Nelson, an author of the report, "Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security: Impacts and Costs of Adaptation to 2050". "Biological impacts on crop yields work through the economic system resulting in reduced production, higher crop and meat prices, and a reduction in cereal consumption. This reduction means reduced calorie intake and increased childhood malnutrition."

Nelson and his colleagues, working with funding from the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, estimated global agricultural impacts by pairing IFPRI's own economic models for crop yields with climate models for precipitation and temperature from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Assuming a world that is slow to adapt to climate change and focused on regional self-reliance, the researchers found that children in the developing world—which are the countries expected to provide the bulk of population growth to nine billion or more by mid-century—will be hardest hit.

"It's not economic development that matters in this case, it's the location on the surface of the Earth," Nelson notes. Without better crop varieties or other agricultural technology improvements, irrigated wheat yields, for example, will fall at least 20 percent by 2050 as a result of global warming, and south Asia as well as parts of sub-Saharan Africa will face the worst effects.

Even without climate change, population pressure alone will cause a spike in food prices without intervention, according to IFPRI's economic model. For example, without climate change, wheat prices might rise from $113 per metric ton in 2000 to $158 per metric ton in 2050—an increase of 39 percent. Similarly, rice prices would soar by 62 percent, maize by 63 percent. But factoring in climate change will boost wheat prices by at least 170 percent and rice by a minimum of 113 percent; the cost of maize will be at least 148 percent higher than at the turn of the century by mid-century.

Nor will the developed world go unscathed. Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science in August noted that corn, soybean and cotton yields in the U.S. will drop precipitously because of additional days where the temperature is above 30 degrees Celsius.

Part of the problem is that the benefits of better plant growth, thanks to higher carbon dioxide concentrations (plants use CO2 for photosynthesis) are more than offset by the impact of higher temperatures and differing precipitation. "If you grow a plant in a bell jar in a lab and increase the CO2 inside, the plants will perform better. [But] will those results translate into farmer's fields? Evidence that we've been getting from farmer's fields suggests perhaps not," Nelson says. And that means fewer calories per person would be available in 2050.

To prevent this agricultural crisis, Nelson estimates, would require an investment of at least $7 billion per year in the most affected countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for increased agricultural research into, for example, drought-resistant crop varieties. "Crop and livestock productivity–enhancing research, including biotechnology, will be essential to help overcome stresses due to climate change," the report's authors wrote.

These areas will also need expanded rural road and irrigation infrastructure as well as improvements to the efficiency of that irrigation.

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  Moonbeam,

While reducing energy demand makes sense on paper I seriously doubt it’s going to happen, if you look back through history man has simply replaced one outdated or depleted energy source with another and I can’t see the future being any different.

As oil runs out the cost will increase but the demand won’t diminish, alternative energy sources will become more viable and people, scrupulous and not so scrupulous, will rush to fill the demand and their pockets. The really clever ones will already have a toehold in the market and really clever governments will be doing everything they can to encourage them to do so.

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  Moon, I completely disagree with any notion that any part of the solution calls for a downgrade in quality of life in regards to the conveniences we've become used to circa mid 20th century onward.  I think there are certainly expectations of higher efficiency, but not reductions in kind.

Now, as an engineer, I've been completely opposed to solar cells for 30 years, but not to solar power.  In fact, we have enough solar power in a small patch of desert here in the US to power our entire country, if it's done properly.  Solar cells are one of the least efficient methods, both in production and in deployment, because they only utilize the photons coming from the sun, and ignore the suns natural thermal radiation.  Solar thermal is the way to go.

Winds challenge is a grid that's a hundred years out of date.  Because of the nature of capitalism, politics, and physics, it isn't surprising at all that early stutter steps have occurred.  I'd point you to Tucker and Studebaker though.

This is why the impetus is on governments and not markets to blaze these trails.  Now we're looking at private sector space missions because of the early support for technological development .

Besides that, fossil fuels ARE going to run out, climate change be damned.

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The good news on this horizon comes from recent developments in thermosolar concentrated solar power (CSP). We can now expect effective CSP capacity factors to be increased to the 75% range with technologies that are current and cost effective. In 2010, Italian utility Enel brought on line a 5 MW thermosolar CSP demonstration facility that integrates the two most promising 24/7 baseloading technologies: Molten salt energy storage (MSES) and combined-cycle natural gas power generation. The Enel Archimede plant can operate on stored solar thermal energy alone for several hours. When the thermal reservoir is exhausted a natural gas combined-cycle generator kicks in as needed to meet the relatively light late night and early morning power demand. The result is a reliable baseload 24/7 power plant with around-the-clock generation capability.

Molten Salt Energy Storage

Molten salt energy storage (MSES) is often described as ‘solar salt’ batteries. Unlike lithium-ion chemistry-based batteries, MSES is an incredibly efficient and cost-effective thermal energy storage system. Particularly well suited for thermosolar CSP power plants, MSES retains over 90% of captured heat for up to 24 hours, allowing generation of electricity around the clock in an elegant, economical, and environmentally benign manner.

Several stand-alone MSES CSP power plants have been designed and built recently by the Sener Group. These facilities go a long way to solving the solar capacity problem. Sener’s first MSES facility, built for the ACS Group/ Cobra outside of Grenada, Spain in 2009, is the 50 MW Andasol-1 CSP plant. Andasol-1 uses MSES with 7.5 hours of effective heat storage. This plant has a capacity factor rating of 41%, an impressive increase from the thermosolar CSP industry median of 18%. However, while this allows continued power generation for hours after sunset it still doesn’t get us to the Holy Grail of baseload 24/7 solar power generation.

That goal for a stand-alone thermosolar CSP plant will be achieved near Seville at Sener’s Gemasolar power plant; a baseload 24/7 19 MW CSP tower plant with 15 hours of molten salt energy storage. Gemasolar is scheduled to open in mid-2011 with a remarkable capacity factor of 75%, coming close to coal, nuclear, and natural gas capacities.

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