Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Hurricane Katrina left 80 per cent of New Orleans under water and the neighbouring Gulf Coast of the United States reeling this past week. One million people have been rendered homeless. Three breaches opened up in the levee system protecting New Orleans, much of which lies below sea level, as the hurricane, with winds at 145 miles an hour, created a 20 foot storm surge. It may take 80 days to pump the floodwater out of the city. Many thousands are feared dead, though no official death toll has been released. President George Bush has described Katrina's impact as "one of the worst national disasters in our nation's history."

Mayor Ray Nagin issued a "desperate SOS" to help the thousands of people left stranded in New Orleans without food and water. While most of the city's population left before the storm struck, as many as 200,000 people remained. New Orleans was described as descending into anarchy, with bodies left lying in the streets, as fires, fighting and looting diverted the attention of the emergency services away from the relief effort. The city is being totally evacuated.

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Eighteen leading scientists from Princeton and Harvard universities have written to Congressman Joe Barton, chair of the United States House of Representatives energy and commerce committee, expressing "deep concern" at his demand for information on the research activities of three climate scientists. Barton has asked for details of all sources of funding and ressearch methods and everything ever published from Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University, Ray Bradley at the University of Massachusetts and Malcolm Hughes at the University of Arizona. The three climatologists published an assessment of temperature trends prior to the industrial period, the so-called hockey stick graph, showing that the 20th century warming was without recent precedent.

Alan Leshner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science described the inquiry as "a search for basis to discredit the particular scientists rather than a search for understanding." Democrat Henry Waxman complained that it was a "dubious" inquiry, which many viewed as a "transparent effort to bully and harass climate change experts who have reached a conclusion with which you disagree." Republican Sherwood Boehlert, chair of the House science committee, has written to express his "strenuous objections" to what he sees as a "misguided and illegitimate investigation."

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• Guardian
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The soil-dwelling microbes that make Asian rice farming a major greenhouse gas contributor have been identified. Yahai Lu of the China Agricultural University and Ralf Conrad of the Max-Planck-Institut for Terrestrial Microbiology in Germany used radioactively-labelled carbon dioxide to determine the "central importance" of the Rice Cluster I group of microbes in producing methane.

"Once scientists know which organisms are involved in a particular process, they can focus right down on them and design experiments to work out how important they are," commented Andrew Whiteley of the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology in the United Kingdom. Rice fields release 50 to 100 million tonnes of methane a year.

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Background

• SciDevNet

• GHG Online