MUSIC: "Our World" theme
DE CAPUA: "When you consider that some six million people are estimated to need the drugs, and only maybe about one million or so maybe have it, there's still a big, big gap."
Those stories, the latest climate change research, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
Government forecasters said on Tuesday they expect this year's North Atlantic hurricane season to be more active than normal. The chief hurricane forecaster for the weather service, Gerry Bell, told reporters that the United States and Caribbean countries are looking at probably three to four major hurricanes this year out of an expected 12?15 named storms.
BELL: "Today's updated outlook calls for a high likelihood ? a 75 percent chance ? of an above-normal season. However and fortunately, the possibility of an extremely active season, such as we saw last year, is greatly reduced."
This week's hurricane outlook updates an earlier projection. They're still forecasting an active hurricane season, but a bit less active than it looked in May.
The annual hurricane season is of intense interest in the coastal southeastern United States, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, where these tropical cyclones can do tremendous damage. Last year's storms included Hurricane Katrina, which killed more than 1,000 people and caused billions of dollars in damage.
Hurricanes begin as low-pressure areas off the Atlantic coast of Africa and pick up energy from the warm, tropical ocean as they move west. So, is the recent run of stronger, more frequent hurricanes a reflection of global warming, or just part of a normal cycle? The head of the U.S. ocean research agency, NOAA, Conrad Lautenbacher, suggested more study is needed on the issue.
LAUTENBACHER: "Some research suggests global warming is linked to rising ocean and sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, which may have an impact on hurricane intensity. It is important to stress that there are many factors which impact hurricanes, and NOAA supports and values a wide variety of research, which will help to identify those factors and their impact on hurricane freqency and/or intensity."
NOAA administrator Conrad Lautenbacher. Incidentally, the government forecast is generally consistent with one issued last week by Colorado State University.
We're so used to seeing satellite weather pictures that it's sometimes easy to forget that the satellite era is less than 50 years old. Months after the first satellite ? the Soviet Sputnik ? was launched, the first U.S. orbiter went into space in 1958, and unlike Sputnik, Explorer One had a science package on board including radiation instruments developed by a team led by James Van Allen.
Van Allen died Wednesday at the age of 91. His instruments discovered radiation surrounding the Earth ? the Van Allen radiation belts, they were named, in his honor.
Space continues to be a platform for scientific inquiry, including two papers published this week, both related to climate change, but from opposite ends of the world ? literally.
Starting in the far north: scientists have used satellite-based gravity measurements to calculate how fast ice is melting in Greenland.
TAPLEY: "The result picks up a rate of melting that is deduced by the ice melting [and] running off into the ocean and changing the gravitational signal of Greenland. It picks up a rate that's large enough to be of some significance. The indication would be consistent with I think at this time fairly well-established global warming impact."
Writing online in Science Express, Byron Tapley and his colleagues at the University of Texas Center for Space Research calculated that Greenland is losing about 240 cubic kilometers of ice per year. That's more than twice as much as estimates less than a decade ago.
Unlike ice in the Arctic Ocean, which has also been melting, this is ice that has been sitting on land, which means when it melts and runs into the sea, it can raise sea level. In addition to that possible long-term threat, Tapley says there's a shorter-term threat to ocean currents, because most of the melting ice is on the east side of Greenland.
TAPLEY: "And there is concern that this fresh water, introduced into the North Atlantic circulation, a polar gyre just off the eastern side of Greenland, if that fresh water will essentially mess up the return flow and stop that current from carrying warm water up into that northern trend, and it would have a fairly significant climate impact."