The world’s climate crisis is making hurricanes more potent, reports CNN:
The proportion of high-intensity hurricanes has increased due to warmer global temperatures, according to a UN climate report released earlier this month. Scientists have also found that the storms are more likely to stall and lead to devastating rainfall and they last longer after making landfall.
“We have good confidence that greenhouse warming increases the maximum wind intensity that tropical cyclones can achieve,” Jim Kossin, senior scientist with the Climate Service, an organization that provides climate risk modeling and analytics to governments and businesses, told CNN. “This, in turn, allows for the strongest hurricanes — which are the ones that create the most risk by far — to become even stronger.” Scientists like Kossin have observed that, globally, a larger percentage of storms are reaching the highest categories — 3, 4 and 5 — in recent decades, a trend that’s expected to continue as global average temperature increases… A 2020 study published in the journal Nature also found storms are moving farther inland than they did five decades ago….
For every fraction of a degree the planet warms, according to the UN report, rainfall rates from high-intensity storms will increase, as warmer air can hold more moisture.
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