The Weather Notebook: Souped Up Hurricanes

Souped Up Hurricanes
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. No matter how much you know about weather, sometimes you just look up at the sky and say, "Oh my God!" I mean lightning, giant snow drifts, sunsets, even wind can at times blow me away excuse the pun. Weather can do the same thing for environmentalist and author Bill McKibben who we spoke to recently in Woods Hole Massachusetts. For him, if there's anything that seems to be like an act of God, it's a hurricane.

BM: "I think hurricanes are magnificent, because they spin up out of nowhere and then they're so huge."

McKibben however feels that the meaning of hurricanes is changing, because human activity, beyond what one might call natural causes, may be whipping hurricanes into an increasing frenzy.

BM: "The fact that they are increasing in frequency and intensity because of human activity is depressing, because they're not quite acts of God in the same way, they're not quite wild in the same way. At some point they become one more form of litter on the landscape."

A landscaped littered with warmth. McKibben feels that this is not something that need come to pass. He has faith that within our lifetimes we'll begin to see the error in our ways and be able to stop the progression of global warming.

BM: "With any luck the time will come pretty soon when we begin to understand that we're going to have to change our act or else watch conditions increasingly spin out of control in all sorts of ways. The earth is a more delicately balanced system then we've realized and if you increase its temperature a few degrees you work all sorts of changes and almost by definition those changes are going to be difficult for us to deal with."

Thanks today go to Brent Runion. Our series senior editor is Jay Alison. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory.