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Catherine Brahic, environment reporter

Every hurricane is different, and a key difference between this year's Ike and Katrina three years ago was in the area it hit. With large areas below sea level and weak levees, New Orleans was far more vulnerable to damage from Katrina than Houston and Galveston were to Ike.

Galveston is among the US coastal cities best-prepared to face a hurricane. It learned the hard way in 1900 when a hurricane hit the low-lying island without warning, killing more than 8000 people.

The city rebuilt, raising land level as much as 5 metres and armouring the coast with a five-metre seawall that now stretches along the eastern 16 kilometers of the island.

Houston is flat and vulnerable to flooding in heavy rains, but only the edge of the city lies on Galveston Bay, which means the heart of the city is protected from storm surges.

Ike's storm surge failed to reach the 6 to 7.5 metres predicted, saving much of Galveston. But coastal areas lacking seawalls, including the western part of Galveston and the Bolivar Peninsula to the east, were devastated, with many houses demolished. Ike was a huge storm, nearly 1000 kilometers across, so its flooding reached east into western Louisiana.

Reports are spotty from the damaged area, most of which remains without power. Many people cannot return to their homes, and people who weathered the storm on Galveston are being evacuated. There are reports of problems in delivering emergency supplies.

Although the New York Times had one chilling on-the-scene report from post-storm Galveston, it is now focusing on the weekend's financial meltdown.

NOLA.com (New Orleans Times-Picayune) reports that parts of Galveston are "all a memory now", while the Houston Chronicle says the return to Galveston could take weeks.

Meanwhile the Port Arthur Texas News had a macabre report of caskets from grave sites being floated by Ike's floodwaters. The Galveston County News site is down at the moment, presumably because of damage.

Jeff Hecht, New Scientist correspondent

Someone, please, clarify something for me: what happens when a president and his vice-president "agree to disagree"?

At least the George W Bush administration was consistent within itself. But with the new Republican ticket, we are faced with the prospect of a US president who is against drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge paired to a VP who staunchly supports it, and says the two will just have to "agree to disagree".

What does that mean? And will she be equally conciliatory about their opposite views regarding the causes of climate change? It's difficult to follow McCain's mercurial views, but he backs the scientific consensus that industrial activities are causing climate change and has supported cap and trade. Palin, on the other hand acknowledges that global warming is happening, but is "not one who would attribute it to being man-made".

When couples agree to disagree, it's generally a way of closing a discussion, shelving it, putting it away, forgetting about it entirely. But this is crunch-time for the climate. In Copenhagen in 2009, world leaders will have to make arguably the most important environmental decision of their respective terms in office.

For the new US government, it will be their first great foray into international climate negotiations. After years of supreme isolationism, finally broken by the Bush administration's astonishing performance at UN climate talks last December, the world will be looking to the US. What - what - will happen if the country's leaders have "agreed to disagree"?

"When it comes to environmental issues, the only difference between George W Bush and Sarah Palin is lipstick," said Kate Troll, executive director of Alaska Conservation Voters, a local green group.

I disagree. Bush may have had his arm twisted, but he did concede that humans are causing climate change. It may have taken many a sleepless night in Bali, but his representatives did agree to draw up a post-Kyoto treaty by 2009. It may have caused him to shun UN discussions on climate change, but his world's biggest emitters committee did create a forum for China and the US to meet and discuss their positions on climate at the highest possible level.

The difference between Bush and Palin is not lipstick. It's much more than that. Palin makes Bush look like a forward-thinking tree-hugger. To elect her would be to take four steps back after it took Bush eight years to take two steps forward.

Yes, in the short term, the world is going to have to burn more fossil fuels. But we desperately need leaders - not just US leaders, mind - who can look beyond the short-term, and far beyond their terms in office. Climate agreements span decades. The leaders who sign them are working on long-term legacy, not short-term glory.

The vacancy at the White House requires someone who can deal with short-term crises and has the ideals to form a realistic long-term vision. With all due respect, Palin does not fit the bill. "Agreeing to disagree" probably makes her a very pleasant person to spend time with. It does not make her a vice-president.

Catherine Brahic, environment reporter

I get irritated with a "Satnav Sally" voice in the car constantly giving me directions - and anyway consider satnav an insult to my map reading skills. But hang on. "Location and timing technologies" - a fancy name for satnav and clocks - apparently could help limit carbon emissions.

The UK government has brought together hundreds of organisations that research, develop and use GPS-based technologies, and formed a network called Location and Timing KTN. At a round table meeting held in London last week members discussed how seemingly "everyday" technologies can help us all go green. As network member Bob Cockshott put it: "[GPS technologies] have personally saved me diesel because I don't get lost as much."

A few more examples:

Colin Beatty of the Royal Institute of Navigation pointed out that when shipping companies bought into satnav, for the first time vessels knew where they were, allowing them to find the "sweet spot" of currents and save on fuel. Beatty said that a company would have recouped that in saved fuel costs within 3 months.

Adrian McMullen used to manage the UK Metropolitan Police car fleet, which saved £125,000 on fuel in one year by getting satnav and tracking devices for all its cars. "For every £1 invested, the fleet got £4 back within a year," said McMullen. Apparently, the cops liked this too because they could see that the money they saved on fuel was going back into making improvements to their services.

As for aviation, Nick MeFarlane of Helios said that GPS allowed planes to find the shortest flight route. In an ideal world, planes should coast down to the runway to use the least amount of fuel - something which GPS can make possible. Managing thousands of flights so they can all coast in and not circle a busy airport's airspace remains a limiting factor. But one of Stockholm's smaller airports is running an experiment at the moment. The control tower is giving each flight an exact time and location for its landing about 30 minutes early, allowing the pilots to calculate the most efficient coasting route.

Within the experiment, each A330 aircraft that lands saves 150kg of fuel and reduces its CO₂ emissions by 470 kg on average. In comparison, the average UK citizen emits 651 kg CO₂ each year in holiday flights.

McFarlane also gave an example from the UK rail industry: some companies are apparently saving millions each year by using a satnav device which switches the trains' diesel engines off when they're going downhill and switches them back on in time at the bottom of the hill.

I reckon I'll be a bit more tolerant of Satnav Sally next time she tells me I missed a right turn.

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

All sorts of things affect temperature measurements, for instance the type of container that a thermometer is placed inside and whether or not air circulates freely within it. Could leap years also introduce a bias in the temperature records used to study climate change?

A paper in Geophysical Research Letters caught my eye recently - the abstract states that the Gregorian calendar introduces a "fundamental bias in four major temperature data sets used in climate analysis". The addition of an extra day in February during a leap year shifts monthly average temperatures every four years, compared to non-leap years, write the researchers (DOI: 10.1029/2008GL035209, PDF, in press).

That something so basic should have been ignored by some of the most eminent meteorological institutions on the planet - the paper mentions a data set maintained by the UK's Hadley Centre and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - came as something as a surprise.

I rang the Hadley Centre to see what they made of the paper. "The effect is real," John Kennedy told me, "but I think they may have overstated its importance."

"The bias is very small, of the order of 0.1°C, and does not affect long-term trends," explained his colleague David Parker. That's because the bias accumulates incrementally every year for four years, then is reset by a leap year.

Trends that show up within four years are not signals of climate change - it takes several decades' worth of data to see the sorts of effects that climatologists look for when studying global warming.

"It is irrelevant to global warming," Parker concludes.

I suspected something might be amiss when I noticed the paper's authors (RS Cerveny, BM Svoma, RC Balling and RS Vose) included some who have held views sceptical of anthropogenic climate change in the past. The paper seems to show that scepticism is not so much a science as it is an expression of results. Both Parker and Kennedy agreed that the effect was real. The problem is not the science or the result (although Kennedy did say he would have liked to know more about the details of the calculations). The problem is calling the result a "fundamental bias".

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics

Scientists who autopsy cetaceans that wash up dead on British beaches have come to a grim conclusion: some species are being killed by bottlenose dolphins.

Dead porpoises (and other cetaceans) turn up regularly on beaches around Britain. According to a Defra report last year (pdf), the cause of death of 15 out of 56 porpoise bodies found - the majority - was "physical trauma (bottlenose dolphin attack)". The photo above shows the rake marks on a harbour porpoise caused by a bottlenose dolphin.

The killings were first reported from the north-east coast of Scotland, then off the coast of Wales, and this week the body of a Risso's dolphin was found further south still, in Cornwall. The Risso's dolphin (see photo below) was said to have been killed over food shortages and dolphins were described as being so hungry they are turning on each other.

Autopsies show some of the dead animals (13 out of 56) have died of starvation. But not all, and the bottlenose killers are not eating the porpoises they kill. In the case of the Risso's dolphin, it is not even a competitor for the same prey (Risso's feed on squid). So why are they killing other cetaceans?

"We can't state confidently that the killings are tied to declining fish stocks," says dolphin expert Nick Tregenza, who advises the Marine Strandings Network in Cornwall. His guess? "They could be doing it for fun."

Bottlenose dolphins are known to spread behaviour culturally and there are extensive records of violence between and within dolphin pods.

"Killing for fun" could be another culturally transmitted behaviour.

Tregenza likens it to the spread of milk-bottle opening by blue tits.
"It could be a form of play rather than food competition," he suggests.

Alternatively, he says, a bottlenose dolphin might have tried to help the weak Risso's dolphin and become angry when the Risso's failed to respond.

In a sick way, I kind of like the "killing for fun" explanation. Tregenza says the Cornwall Wildlife Trust has reported that dolphins have been seen picking up stones from the sea bed and throwing them on the surface. "They were thought to be throwing stones at seals on rocks not far away," Tregenza says.

Stone-throwing and killing for fun. Dolphins are even more like us than we thought.


Rowan Hooper, online news editor

Photo courtesy of Cornwall Wildlife Trust Marine Strandings Network

The dead Risso's dolphin, killed by a bottlenose (photo: Mike Hicks)

John McCain's choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as running mate has sparked a lot of interest, and no little concern, among both republicans and democrats. With all the fuss over hunting, creationism and teenage pregnancies, her views on environmental issues such as climate change, energy and the drilling of oil reserves in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) have been overlooked. So let's look at them.

First up, Palin told Newsmax.com that while a changing environment will adversely affect Alaska, "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made".

It certainly tallies with comments made by her spokesperson Curtis Smith in 2006 when she was running for Governor of Alaska, which suggested she wasn't ruling out the possibility that climate change is due to a natural cycle of warming on Earth.

McCain, like his rival Barack Obama, has outlined targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. So it is intriguing that McCain should choose a running mate with such maverick views.

Palin's track record on similar issues has contributed to her reputation as an anti-environmentalist. She sued the Department of the Interior for classifying polar bears as an endangered species, and she is against federal attempts to list Cook Inlet beluga whales as a threatened species. Although the whale population there has fallen from 1300 to 375 over the past 20 years, Palin said classifying the animals as threatened "would do serious long-term damage to the vibrant economy of the Cook Inlet area".

She encourages human intervention in wildlife in the form of shooting wolves and bears to boost caribou and moose populations, and she recently expressed her personal opposition to Proposition 4 which would have restricted gold and copper mine development to help protect drinking water, salmon and the Bristol Bay ecosystem from toxic runoff.

All this is at a time when President Bush is seemingly trying to protect marine wildlife, asking his administration to draft a plan to set aside three massive areas of the Pacific Ocean – the Mariana Trench, Rose Atoll in American Samoa and parts of the Line Islands. So is McCain's choice a case of opposites attract or is it a sign of things to come in his Republican Party?

Take McCain's changing view on oil drilling. Although initially he was against plunging into the rich oil reserves of north-east Alaska's ANWR, it seems someone or something has persuaded him to re-assess his position. Recently McCain called for the federal ban on offshore drilling to be lifted, a move supported by Palin and recently enacted by Bush. Now that the Alaska Governor is McCain's sidekick, will she tempt him into opening up the ANWR? She told Newsmax that "we could have a small footprint, and not adversely impact the land, the wildlife, that's part of Alaska".

Palin apparently believes the US needs to delve into Alaska's natural oil and gas reserves to relieve the nation's dependency on other nations: "We are sending diplomats to the Mideast begging for more oil production," she told Charleston.net. "At the same time, it is so easy to release demand right here in Alaska. It makes no sense to me."

McCain has proposed The Lexington Project as a means to produce "more power, pushing technology to help free our transportation sector from its use of foreign oil, cleaning up our air, addressing climate change, and ensuring that Americans have dependable energy sources." Although he may profess to incorporate alternative energy resources in his plans, I don’t hear much from Palin other than that they "are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop".

I get the distinct feeling that the little pro-environment voice that may be keeping McCain on the right track to addressing climate change will be drowned out by Palin's shouts. I guess only time will tell.

Gursharan Randhawa, New Scientist contributor

Labels: climate change, climate sceptics, endangered species, energy, environment, global warming, North America, oil, whale