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| Climate change to spawn more hurricanes |
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 The world could see as many as 20 additional hurricanes and tropical storms each year by the end of the century because of climate change, says a study out Monday.
The study was in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), written by climate researcher Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
On average, about 90 tropical cyclones form each year around the world, Emanuel says. “Tropical cyclone” is an umbrella term that includes hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, which are all the same type of storm that have different labels depending on where they form.
Emanuel’s study used six newly upgraded global climate computer models to simulate future hurricane activity around the world. His study found that these killer storms will not only increase in intensity during the 21st century, as many previous studies had predicted, but will also increase in frequency in most locations.
“Our study suggests that the largest increases might occur in the western North Pacific region, but with noticeable increases in the South Indian Ocean and in the North Atlantic region,” he says. Most hurricanes that affect the U.S. form in the Atlantic.
Category 3 storms have sustained wind speeds of at least 111 mph. Any Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane is classified as a “major” hurricane.
Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry, who was not part of the study, warns, the “conclusions from this study rely on a large number of assumptions, many of which only have limited support from theory and observations and hence are associated with substantial uncertainties. Personally, I take studies that project future tropical cyclone activity from climate models with a grain of salt.”
Another researcher, Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, who was not part of the PNAS study, says, “Kerry Emanuel is a smart scientist; I’ll trust that he has done good work here.”
However, Pielke says his own research — along with Emanuel’s other work — suggests that the ability to detect any signal of human-caused climate change on the impacts of hurricanes on society will take many decades, and maybe centuries.
(Source: USA Today)
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