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that the top one thousand feet of ocean had warmed half a degree, and said that the panel had no way of judging future trends—there simply wasn't enough evidence either way, and certainly not enough to support the popular contention that extreme weather was happening more often. It's fair to say, though, that this conclusion was not at all unanimous. One of the leading authors of the IPCC's next report (scheduled for 2007) was quoted in 2005 as suggesting that warming sea temperatures and rising sea levels caused by global warming were changing conditions for hurricanes, and that the extrabusy 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons may well be a harbinger for the future. He was promptly accused of politicizing the science, and a flurry of resignations from the IPCC followed. The author retorted that he hadn't meant there'd be more hurricanes, only bigger ones, but this gloss mollified no one.

Obviously, temperature changes in the oceans have some effect, but what? Some hints can be found, but they are tantalizingly vague. For example, the southern Saharan fringe was unusually damp in the 1950s, and suffered unusually devastating droughts in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2004, as acknowledged in the first chapter, it rained again along the southern Sahara, which includes Darfur. These rainfall data correlate neatly with temperature shifts in the oceans, whether higher than normal temperatures in the southern Atlantic or Indian oceans, or lower than normal temperatures in the North Atlantic, which in turn neatly correlate with the waxing and waning of hurricane cycles. A one-on-one causality is far from proven, but the coincidences are startling.

In 2005, near the end of a uniquely busy hurricane season—the season in which Katrina, Rita, and Wilma all battered the U.S. mainland—Science published a new statistical study that actually showed the number of storm days and the raw number of tropical cyclones decreasing over the past decade, in all ocean basins except the Atlantic. The proportion of severe storms, Category 4 and Category 5, however, increased sharply.24

This still doesn't tell us, though, whether severe weather will increase. Or decrease. El Niiios, as we have seen, can sometimes have a mitigating effect. Similarly, hurricanes affect climate, just as climate affects hurricanes. But the global General Circulation Models (GCMs) aren't consistent. Just as some say the American Great Lakes will dry up as the world warms, and others speculate that they might actually increase in volume, so storm predictions are all over the map, quite literally. Climate change could raise upper-level atmospheric temperatures, or it could lower them, which would increase or decrease the differentials between surface and high-level temperatures, and so change the threshold point for hurricanes. Also, a warmer world might have stronger upper-level winds, which would kill hurricanes as strong upper winds do now. Or it might increase El Ninos, which would increase Pacific typhoons but decease Atlantic hurricanes. Or none of the above. Severe weather might even become less frequent in a warmer world, not more so. If you see a confident prediction about the bad stuff coming because of global warming, treat it with the utmost skepticism. 25

III

Because ours is a technological age, dozens of high-tech solutions have been proposed for solving the atmospheric carbon problem, to the evident disdain of ecologists, whose solution seems mostly to be to leave the carbon where it is, in coal mines and oil fields, and cut down consumption instead. Some of these solutions might work; others seems reminiscent of the scheme to control hurricanes by flying propeller-driven aircraft into them to unwind their rotation.

An example is the grove of rotating three-hundred-foot synthetic trees proposed by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The notion was to use giant plastic blades to direct wind onto a filter dusted with sodium hydroxide. The resulting byproduct, sodium carbonate, would be scraped out and heated to free the CO2, which would