Global Warming Making Hurricanes More Powerful
I kept hearing the reporters and weather people on CNN and TWC calling Katrina various forms of unprecedented and once in a lifetime. Several meteorologists seem surprised that it gained so much intensity so quickly and that it held its intensity as long as it did. Global warming may be the answer as to why Katrina behaved as it did:
he accumulated power of Atlantic hurricanes has more than doubled in the past 30 years, according to a study to be published this week, and global warming likely is a major cause.
Though a connection between global warming and hurricane ferocity might seem logical, the report by a reputable climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the first to draw a statistical relationship between the two.
“The large upswing in the last decade is unprecedented and probably reflects the effect of global warming,” scientist Kerry Emanuel wrote in a study that will appear in the Thursday edition of the journal Nature. Copies of the article were made available Sunday.
Importantly, his study did not shed any light on the effect, if any, of global warming on the number of storms.
The study does not say that the number of storms will increase. But what storms we do get we can expect to be more intense. Katrina will not be the last city-killer storm that we see, as long as we ignore global warming.