Hurricane Link To Climate Change Explained : Discovery News
Kerry Emanuel: Most of us think that we are seeing a climate change signal in the North Atlantic, which is by far the best observed and has been observed for the longest period of time; but I hasten to add that only about 12 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic. The other parts of the world are not so well observed.
...our data is a bit tenuous and is not for very long, so nobody has a great deal of confidence in it.
...they could become stronger, at least theoretically.
...as the temperature gets warmer and warmer, ironically it becomes more difficult to start a hurricane, even though once you start a hurricane, potentially it can become more intense, so you have these two contradictory things going on.
...we don’t see such a tight connection between hurricane power and temperature in the western North Pacific that we see in the Atlantic.
We’re not quite sure what is so special about the Atlantic. There are some indications that in the Atlantic kind of an alignment goes on. There are a lot of different things that affect hurricanes, not just temperature...
I should emphasize that it’s a young science, this connection between hurricanes and climate. We’re making progress and we are beginning to see a consensus developing in certain parts of the problem, but there is still a lot of it we don’t understand.
...When, on the other hand, it comes down to measures of hurricane activity that people care about – for example, the frequency of landfall of intense hurricanes in North America – whenever you get down to that telescopic level of detail, the models inevitably disagree violently with each other, and so scientists are left without much to go on.
And so when it comes to forecasting the things that people really care about, I don’t think there’s going to be much consensus about that for a very long time. We’re going to form a very strong consensus maybe about things that don’t really matter to people.
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Kerry Emanuel: I’m not comfortable with any predictions. Seeing into the future is pretty tough...when we look at metrics that we care about, like hurricane damage – which is caused by a tiny fraction of those events – we would need to wait decades before we see a signal in that.
So we’re in an awkward position. I think hurricane scientists are becoming better and better and better at looking for keys under the lamp, and eventually we’ll find them. But the things people care about aren’t under the lamp, and it will be a long time before we find those.
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