Of hurricanes and ice floes

As TBO will attest to, I have a sick penchant for watching the weather channel during tropical storm season. I suppose it's the lack of any weather at all in SoCal that has prompted this fascination; I truly wouldn't relish living in areas annually threatened by severe weather, and I honestly empathize with those who do. Due to TBO's insistence that we watch TV that isn't talking heads describing wind, rain, and storm surges (imagine!), I've been checking out the Weather Underground website to get my fix of disasters both impending and averted. Unfortunately, we already have a candidate for the season's worst hurricane, at least as far as Jamaica is concerned. Hurricane Dean is a major Category 4 (out of 5) storm, with winds of up to 150 miles an hour (Cat 5 begins at 155), and it is headed like a bullet for Jamaica, which hasn't been threatened like this in about 100 years. After that, it is expected to lay waste to Cozumel and Cancun, although Dean has been moving so quickly it probably won't be as bad as 2005's Wilma, which stuck around the Yucatan for 3 whole days. Check out Jeff Masters' blog for details.
One of Masters' other entries, however, alerts us to a problem that faces all of us. Apparently, the Arctic polar ice cap has already set a record minimum of coverage. When one considers that we are still in the middle of August, and that summer has a full 4+ weeks to go, we are looking at an unprecedented melt. Granted, this type of measurement has only been undertaken since 1979, but the previous record was set just 2 years ago. Gee, I wonder what could be causing once-a-century hurricanes and unrecorded levels of polar ice melt . . .
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