Climate Change is Making Hurricanes Even More Destructive, Research Finds (theguardian.com)

Hurricane Harvey swamped Houston with seven days of pounding rain last August. When scientists went back to look at historical weather patterns, they reported Harvey dumped 20 percent more rain than it typically would have. The culprit: climate change. From a report: High-resolution climate simulations of 15 tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans found that warming in the ocean and atmosphere increased rainfall by between 5% and 10%, although wind speeds remained largely unchanged. This situation is set to worsen under future anticipated warming, however. Researchers found that if little is done to constrain greenhouse gas emissions and the world warms by 3C to 4C this century then hurricane rainfall could increase by a third, while wind speeds would be boosted by as much as 25 knots.

"Climate change has exacerbated rainfall and is set to enhance the wind speed," said Christina Patricola, who undertook the study with her Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory colleague Michael Wehner. "My hope is that this information can be used to improve our resilience to the kinds of extreme weather events we are going to have in the future." The research, published in the journal Nature, used climate models to see how factors such as air and ocean temperatures have influenced hurricanes. Projections into the future were then made, based upon various levels of planetary warming. The findings suggest that enormously destructive storms have already been bolstered by climate change and similar events in the future are on course to be cataclysmic.

Comments

Re:Hypothesis and Disproof

[whoever57]

âoeNOAA: U.S. Completes Record 11 Straight Years Without Major Hurricane Strikeââ"headline, CNSNews, Oct. 24, 2016

Except that you are a moron for conflating two distinct issues.

Issue 1: Hurricanes.
Issue 2: Hurricanes that made landfall on the USA.

Accuracy is generally improving

[rsilvergun]

See here. Though it's still not enough to say if your city will be spared or not. We know enough to tell people when to evacuate, which is pretty damn good if you ask me.

Your post seems to be trying to cast shade on scientists, implying that their computer models are purposefully wrong. They're not. Again, these computer models are amazing things that are saving lives.

I'm not sure if you really intended to imply the scientists are lying for the sake of profit, but you are. Comments like yours are part of a broader narrative to discredit scientists in general. That narrative is coming out of right wing, pro-corporate think tanks who don't want their profits jeopardized. It's not even that there'd be all that much less money going around if we fought climate change instead of ignoring it, rather the money might go somewhere else. Somewhere besides their coffers.

Again, I don't know if you were aware of all this when you posted, but if by some chance you read my post, well, congrats, you are now. The only question is what are you going to do with this information?