This article does not take the same position as the one that states that GW may help by preventing hurricane landfalls but it does discuss how it is most likely not making hurricanes stronger.  It attributes the strengthening of hurricanes in the last 13 years to a natural cycle that happens every few decades and it is just a coincidence that it is happening the same time as GW.  It did mention that GW may prevent hurricanes from reaching land but it seemed that there was no hard evidence to support this (is there ever?).

 Good for Effects on the World. Some Researchers See No Link Between Global Warming, Hurricane Activity

The Maldives is a chain of islands that compose a small country.  They fear that when Global Warming gets bad enough to raise the sea level, that their entire country will disappear beneath the ocean.  The president of the Maldives has tried political approaches to solve Global Warming such as signing the Kyoto Protocal but he fears it will not invoke enough change to save his tiny country.  So he has built a wall around one of the islands that make up his country, he did so by convincing Japan to pay for it.  However it makes the island less attractive and draw less tourists, which is the country’s main income.  To solve this engineers pumped sand from the ocean floor into a shallw lagoon and created another island.  This island is substantially higher than the sea level and they hope that this height difference will be enough to suffice.

 This pertains great to the prevention, my, group but it does not have a substantial amount of information and I have found no other solutions such as these so I am a little hesitant to use this.

 Maldives Build Barriers Against Global Warming

While the specifics were not provided this story talks about a very energy efficient and environmentally friendly city.  The highlights being zero carbon emissions, zero waste, 75% reduced water production, 80% water recycled, and run completely on 100% renewable energy.  Like I stated before, they did not go into the details of how they planned on achieving this idealistic city or even when it would be put into place.  From the scarce details I was able to pick up it seemed that to eliminate carbon emissions each person would have their own little magnetic, I think, tram which would take them directly to where they needed to go or to a sort of monorail run exclusively on renewable energy.

This plan has great potential but I fear that it will end up being unreachable and just another Utopian idea.  This works great for my group, prevention, but seeing as not too many details are discussed there is not much to work from.

The Future of Masdar City

We went up FeeFee road and interviewed some people in that strip where the liscence bureau is on the…whatever last thursday was (srry slept for first time this weekend yesterday).  It seemed to me that people were more afraid of being filmed even though their excuse was that they did not know anything, when we said that was fine they still refused.  That is ok though because we got four pretty good ones, only half of the footage can definately be used for our segment so the other groups will probably like us a lot.  We also got a lot of still shots which we can show while the people are talking, one guy was talking about this building across the street ( I cant remember why) so we got that to put up during his interview.  We also filmed the six, I think there were six, flags of a couple of different countries so that we can show that during our question about which nation is responsible.  Overall I think it was a pretty successful trip, we got some good footage.

How often do you take trips to Germany?

On your trips have you noticed any prominent environmental laws? If so what? (hopefully something about der Grüne Punkt)

What exactly is der Grüne Punkt?

How do you believe this helps with environmentaly issues such as GW?

Does the government do anything else such as this to help the earth?

Have you ever heard of the U.S. doing anything such as this? If so what? or if not Why do you think that is?

 If anyone could make any suggestions, I would be much obliged.  If you did not know this already, “Frau” means Mrs. in German, so these are questions for my German teacher about a law on recycling in Germany which we learned about last year.

1. Recycling cans on driveways, as cost for trash increases so do the amount of people recycling

2. Hybrid cars

3. Lightbulbs in fan or lighting fixture changing, one by one, to energy efficient bulbs (the curly ones)those turn on and make the world a little brighter, easiest to do and has a message that says “if we dont change who will” seems to give the biggest meaning for something that relates to everyone.

4. Big industrial smokestack releasing lots of gas into air

5. Solar panels/wind powered generators popping up in fields (harder to do)

Hi my name is Brandon S and I am a student at Parkway North High.  Our english class is doing a documentary over GW and I was wondering if anyone in your department would be willing and who would have the time to answer a few questions to be used in the film. . .Thank you very much! I will contact him/her (or) Well thank you for your time anyway.

Hi my name is Brandon S and I am a student at Parkway North High.  Our english class is doing a documentary over GW and I was wondering if I could take a moment of your time and set up an appointment for us to meet so that I could ask you a few short questions.

1. How can people help stop GW?

2. Can you give us a list of things people can do?

3. How does recylcing help prevent GW?

4. What kind of things make GW worse or even cause it?

5. How can the government help the situation?

We are open for any suggestions that could help our, prevention of GW, group finalize our questions.  Also if you find that any of these questions intrude on any other group’s topic too much then we would like to be aware of this. 

How concerned are you about GW?

Are you doing anything to save the planet? What?

Would you be willing to …to have a positive affect on GW?
(list of possibilities)

Are you aware of what can be recycled if so what?

Are you aware of how the future might be if we do not try to help now?

Do you believe that there is enough awareness?
(how were you made aware?)

What types of solutions have you heard of?

Do you believe that there is enough awareness of solutions?

What do you see people doing in your neighborhood to end GW?

Are the solutions easy to accomplish?

Where do you think the focus of GW funds should be on?

What part of GW should be looked and researched the most in order to prevent it?

Do you think that any one nation or group should try to prevent GW more any others?

If you had 1 billion dollars, what would you do with it if you could only use it for the prevention GW?

While the meaning of this brief article was a little sketchy to me I think I managed to get the gist of it.  It seems like it is trying to say that the warming of the oceans will decrease the vertical wind shear of the Atlantic ocean which is a major player in hurricanes.  This would result in less Atlantic hurricanes striking the U.S. However later it said that it would increase the vertical wind shear in both the pacific and indian oceans and that plays a major role in decreasing the VWS (vertical wind shear) in the Atlantic.  That came off to me as a pretty big trade off. I am not overly sure if that means that hurricanes would start hitting us from the pacific or just make the ones that do occur there worse.

 While I do not know enough about hurricanes it seems to me that if we would only trade which direction the hurricanes came at us from then GW does not affect the U.S. too much.  However if it makes the ones that occur in the pacific worse and spell more danger for the nations that fall victim to those hurricanes than GW affects the world in a very negative way. 

The other side of the discussion could be that because GW is reducing the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. with no downsides than GW has a very positive effect.

This article should help the groups working on the effects and how bad it is.

Warmer Ocean Could Reduce Number of Atlantic Hurricane Landfalls