Are humans to blame for Florence?
A GROWING BODY OF RESEARCH SHOWS THAT, THANKS TO CLIMATE CHANGE, STORMS WILL GET STRONGER AND WETTER OVER THE COURSE OF THIS CENTURY
A growing body of research shows that, thanks to climate change, storms will get stronger |
It may be human nature to want to assign blame for terrible events — and since climate change became part of public consciousness, it’s a frequently faulted for natural disasters. Is Hurricane Florence our fault for emitting climatechanging greenhouse gases, or perhaps policymakers’ fault for allowing us to do so?
The answer is the same one that applies to cancer. Environmental factors such as excessive UV radiation, second-hand smoke and certain chemical exposures increase risk, but cancer has been around since the age of the dinosaurs, and there’s an element of randomness to it. It may be impossible to conclude any single risk factor was the single cause of any given case.
With climate change, there is a growing body of work showing that storms will get stronger and wetter over the course of this century.
With regard to Hurricane Florence, in a little more than a day, Florence exploded in strength, jumping from a Category 1 to a Category 4 behemoth with 140mph winds. This process — hurricanes intensifying fast — is both extremely dangerous and poorly understood.
New research says that as the climate continues to warm, storms will be faster, frequent, and in some extreme cases, grow so powerful that they might arguably be labelled “Category 6.”
The warming, says front line research, is happening in the deeper layers of the ocean, and this will give more fuel to tropical storms. Normally, cold water churned up in the path of a hurricane helps it burn out.
The US National Academy of Sciences looked into the matter in 2016, with its report Attribution of Extreme Events in the Context of Climate Change.
University of Georgia meteorology professor J. Marshall Shepherd, who contributed to the report, said that it’s much easier to connect climate change to extreme heat spells, and the relative lack of recent cold spells.
There, the models predict these events, and there are good records from the past and a good understanding of the physics behind the phenomena.
The new science is a testament to the growing ability of supercomputing to power simulations of the planet that show the future of massive features like the atmosphere and oceans, but still also maintain enough detail to capture smaller ones like Category 4 and 5 hurricanes.
That’s how a model created at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory generated the new findings, and identified how fastintensifying storms could make things a whole bunch worse later in this century.
“The reason there are going to be more major hurricanes is not necessarily there are going to be that many more storms ... it’s really the fact that those storms are going to get there faster,” said Kieran Bhatia, lead author of the new research in the Journal of Climate.
We’ve already seen the signs, of ultra-intense hurricanes. Last year’s Hurricane Maria that struck Puerto Rico spun up from a mere tropical depression into a Category 5 storm in just over two days; 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, which affected Mexico, Central America and Texas, had winds in the Eastern Pacific exceeding 330km/h, more than 80km/h stronger than the weakest category 5 storms.