The U.S. Geological Survey has some insight into what lies beneath/near/on the Arctic Circle:

1. An estimated 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil
2. Enough oil to supply the WORLD’s needs for nearly 3 years.
3. Maybe 1.670 trillion cubic fee of natural gas
4. About 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil
5. About 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas
6. About 20% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas liquids
7. Some 400 oil and gas fields north of the Arctic Circle
8. The home to polar bears already losing their natural habitat to melting of their land
9. A possible cause for a conflict between Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark and the United States who are laying claim to chunks of the huge energy resources.

So, should we go drilling or not? Remember what arthroscopic surgery can do before answering that question.

Hurricane season this year is expected to be longer, stormier and arrive earlier. Climate scientists are saying that this centuries storms are bigger than last century’s because the area of warm water that can support hurricanes is growing larger. The Atlantic Ocean is more hurricane friendly.

”There has been an increase in the seasonal length over the last century,” Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

The estimated increase if 5 days longer than it was in 1915. The first named storm of this year arrived one day before the official hurricane season was to begin on June 1st. (I wonder, do hurricanes know they are not supposed to arrive before June 1st?)

There is no definitive link to global warming. (Give people time and they’ll find a way.) Climate models aren’t able to reproduce individual storms but the founder of the study above thinks out loud, “it’s likely that the warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases is a major factor in the seasonal shift based on observations of changes in recent decades and the predictions models are making for the changing conditions in the Atlantic basin.”

Let’s see, models can’t produce storms but they can predict. Hmm…something wrong here. The guy went on to say, “The length of the hurricane season is ‘one of the potentially big signals’ that could change in response to global warming.”

And he knows this because of why?