A new technique for deriving hurricane climatologies from global data, applied to climate models, indicates that global warming should reduce the global frequency of hurricanes, though their intensity may increase in some locations.

Tropical cyclones account for the majority of natural catastrophic losses in the developed world and, next to floods, are the leading cause of death and injury among natural disasters affecting developing countries (UNDP/BCPR 2004). It is thus
of some interest to understand how their behavior is affected by climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic.

Next week, government negotiators will gather in Bangkok, Thailand, for the latest round of international climate change talks.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Mauna Loa CO2 record, the longest continuous record of CO2 in the atmosphere. Initiated by Charles D. Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the record provided the first compelling evidence that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was rising.

Climate change authorities long ago tagged carbon dioxide public enemy number one. Now, there may be a new number two: tiny particles of black carbon, or soot. According to a new analysis reported online in Nature Geoscience, climate scientists are concluding that reports such as last November's assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may seriously underestimate black carbon's role in global warming.

Abstract Black carbon in soot is the dominant absorber of visible solar radiation in the atmosphere. Anthropogenic sources of black carbon, although distributed globally, are most concentrated in the tropics where solar irradiance is highest. Black carbon is often transported over long distances, mixing with other aerosols along the way. The aerosol mix can form transcontinental plumes of atmospheric brown clouds, with vertical extents of 3 to 5 km.

Climate sceptics are right. Temperature increases do precede rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide - the opposite of what you would expect if changes in CO2 levels were really driving climate change.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Albert Gore Jr., sending a strong message about the importance of the world's future climate. Indeed, for two decades, international scientists and policy-makers contributing to the IPCC process have provided assessments of climate change science, impacts and mitigation, addressing one of the most far-reaching and complex challenges that society has ever faced. Yet this is no time for IPCC to rest on its laurels.

Dinosaurs might have known a surprising amount about what we think of as a quintessentially modern problem: global warming.