A recent study published in the journal Nature Communications finds that climate change made these storms far worse than they would have been without human-caused global warming. But there is increasingly little doubt that human-caused warming is heating ocean-surface temperatures, which fuel big storms. They mapped out how the hurricane season would have proceeded without climate change and compared it to what happened. The three-hour extreme rainfall rate was 11 percent higher than it would have been absent climate change, they found, and the three-day extreme rainfall accumulation total was 8 percent higher. The study’s authors noted that their results are just one indication that climate change is worsening hurricane strength in a variety of ways.

Source: Washington Post May 29, 2022 20:01 UTC