Prepare for Hurricane Season

Stronger storms due to climate change

By Max Lederer Position: Staff Writer

Hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more intense in the U.S., Central America and other parts of the world today in large part due to climate change.

In 2020 and 2021 alone, the World Meteorological Organization used up all the assigned names for tropical storms and hurricanes, having to resort to the Greek alphabet for means of additional identification. 

With global warming and climate change factored in, storms are growing stronger, spawning more tornadoes, carrying increased precipitation and resulting in severe storm surge. Warmer ocean temperatures cause hurricanes to undergo rapid intensification leading to significant damage on coastlines and inland locations.

“The trend is there and it is real. There’s this remarkable building of this body of evidence that [humans are] making these storms more deleterious,” James P. Kossin, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told The New York Times.

Hurricanes are becoming more and more frequent. There are five hurricane categories:

Category 1 with winds of 74-95 mph, Category 2 with winds of 96-110 mph, Category 3 with winds of 111-129 mph, Category 4 with winds of 130-156 mph, and Category 5 with winds 157 miles per hour and over..

“Over the long term, the risk landscape could change in a bad way, not in a good way,” said Kossin to The New York Times.

In late summer 2021, Hurricane Ida made landfall in New Orleans on the anniversary of

Hurricane Katrina and was just as powerful, leaving New Orleans completely in

the dark. 

With increases in greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, climate change and global warming are accelerating. As a result, natural disasters like hurricanes are intensifying and leaving more devastation in their wake.

Reference