Climate change made Hurricane Helene and other 2024 disasters more damaging, scientists find.
Rising global temperatures are amplifying deadly extreme weather events.Yale Climate Connections Dana Nuccitelli October 9, 2024 Sadly Hurricane Helene, wildfires in the Amazon, an extreme monsoon downpour in India, a heat wave during the Summer Olympics, and other dangerous and devastating weather events in 2024 were all made more likely and dam aging by climate change, scientists have found. Climate scientists quantified the link by running thousands of simulations in climate models, some that included and some that did not include the effects of human-caused climate pollution in the atmosphere. They also examined past and present weather data to see how the probability of these kinds of events has changed in a hotter world. This approach, known as attribution science, is a relatively new branch of climate science. It has enabled scientists to conclude that human-caused climate change made many recent extreme weather events much more damaging, deadly, and expensive than they would otherwise have beenClimate change increased Hurricane Helene’s and Milton’s potential destructiveness.........Hurric
On Wednesday, the science group World Weather Attribution released an analysis of how climate change affected Hurricane Helene. Their main findings.....
- Hurricanes as intense as Hurricane Helene are today about 2.5 times more likely in the region: They would be expected to occur on average every 130 years in a preindustrial climate but now have a one-in-53 chance in any given year.
- Hurricane Helene’s wind speeds on the coast of Florida were about 13 miles per hour or 11% more intense due to climate change.
- Climate change increased Hurricane Helene’s rainfall by about 10%. This level of rainfall that led to catastrophic flooding in the Appalachians has shifted from a once-in-115-year event to a once-in-70-year event today as a result of climate change.
- The high sea temperatures that fueled Hurricane Helene were made 200 to 500 times more likely by climate change.
“Yet again, our study has shown that hurricanes will keep getting worse if humans keep burning fossil fuels and subsequently warming the planet,” Friederike Otto, lead of World Weather Attribution and senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said in a news release. “Americans shouldn’t have to fear hurricanes more violent than Helene – we have all the knowledge and technology needed to lower demand and replace oil, gas, and coal with renewable energy.” A 5% increase in hurricane winds increases a hurricane’s destructive power by about 50% since hurricane damage grows exponentially with intensity. Thus, the 11% increase in Helene’s winds found by the World Weather Attribution group likely made Helene’s winds more than twice as destructive. And it is hurricane winds that drive storm surge, so although surge was not evaluated directly in the group’s report, it can be inferred that the destructive surge from Helene was made worse by climate change (apart from the separate long-term increase in both surge and everyday water levels caused by warming-induced sea level rise). A separate rapid analysis by scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that climate change caused over 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas and that global warming made the high amount of rainfall up to 20 times more likely in these areas.....and as the damage and related costs rise exponentially the CO2 emissions still increase....read on https://