Global warming helping make hurricanes stronger, study finds

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="95%" height="1"> <tr> <center> <td valign="top" width="33%" height="33"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="5">Global warning making hurricanes stronger, study finds</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">July 13, 2005<br> Special to World Science<br> </font> <font size="2" face="Arial"> <b> <br> </b> </font> <b><font size="2" face="Arial">Global warning is making hurricanes stronger, a new study has found.<br> <br> Hurricanes have already been getting more destructive over the past three decades, according to the study, by Kerry Emanuel of the Massachussets Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., and colleages.<br> <br> Emanuel warns that global warming might increase the effect of hurricanes further still in the coming years.<br> <br> The findings appeared yesterday in the research journal Nature online.<br> <br> Previous studies that have looked at the effects of rising global average temperatures on tropical cyclones—commonly called hurricanes or typhoons—have tended to focus on the issue of whether these events have become more frequent. <br> <br> No such trends have been clearly observed, according to Emanuel. But he looked instead at the question of whether cyclones have got more intense—that is, whether they hit harder and last longer. <br> <br> Theories and computer simulations of climate indicate that warming should indeed generate an increase in storm intensity, he notd. <br> <br> Emanuel analysed records of tropical cyclones since the middle of the twentieth century, and finds that the amount of energy released in these events in both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans has increased markedly since the mid-1970s. <br> <br> Both the duration of the cyclones and the largest wind speeds they produced have increased by about 50 per cent over the past 50 years.<br> <br> Emanuel found that these increases in storm intensity are mirrored by increases in the average temperature at the surface of the tropical oceans, suggesting that this warming—some of which can be ascribed to global warming—is responsible for the greater power of the cyclones. <br> <br> He pointed out that as the human population in coastal regions gets ever denser, the damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future. <br> <br> * * *</font> </p> </b> <p><b><font face="Arial" size="2" color="#FFFFFF">Send us a <a href="mailto:editor@world-science.net">comment</a> on this story, or <a href="mailto:?Body=http://www.world-science.net/othernews/050801_hurricanefrm.htm">send it to a friend</a></font></b> </p> <p>  </center> </p> </td> </tr> </table> </body>