Hurricanes doing more damage

The year 2020 showed us a record breaking number of Atlantic-hurricanes, with 30 named storms, 14 of which morphed into hurricanes with a record tying 7 of those intensifying into major hurricanes. Of the 30 named storms, 11 made landfall in the contiguous United States, exceeding the old record of 9 set in 1916. If global warming is driving dramatic weather change, why did we only just break a record set in 1916?

Research has shown that the number of big hurricanes is not increasing, their intensity is not increasing either. Instead, the time between big hurricanes is decreasing, while the volume of damage from each one is increasing, when compared to previous storms. This seems incongruent until you take into account that in America and around the world, we’ve built hundreds of billions of dollars in property values in the path of severe storms.

 Looking back over the last 150 years, Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University, stated that the data seemed to show no significant increase in hurricane intensity over that time. Conversely, he points out, “Scientific consistency between theories and models indicating that the typical intensity of hurricanes is more likely to increase as the planet warms.”. This heavily caveated conclusion doesn’t provide evidence against the hypothesis that global warming “has acted and will act to intensify hurricane activity,” Vecchi adds.

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