Climate Change - Typhoons

After the BBC news broadcast yesterday we’d thought we would have a chat with you about the climate.

This year alone, the Atlantic hurricane season saw 30 named storms. That’s more than ANY year since the US began naming storms in 1953.

To quote BBC: ‘Could global warming be behind the increase in storms?’

Renato Redentor Constantino – Institute for climate and sustainable cities: ‘The science behind frequency of extreme weather events is not as clear, as the science behind the intensity. Many decades ago we had already been experiencing 20 typhoons a year, and this is normal, it’s not because of climate change. What is certainly going to be different is that the intensity of typhoons has increased’.

Hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones form over warm seawater and cause strong winds, big waves, and heavy rain. The 2020 Atlantic hurricane season was the most active on record, and global warming is thought to be fuelling the intense weather.

‘’A changing climate leads to changes in the frequency, intensity, spatial extent, duration and timing of weather and climate extremes, and can result in unprecedented extremes’’. – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Renato Constantino says there are three ways global warming is making storms more intense.

1. In terms of wind speed, warmer oceans are increasing the velocity, the violence in terms of wind speed that typhoons bring. By the time they make landfall many have become super typhoons.

2. Because of the moisture they bring, rainfall, that often triggers landslides, flooding.

3. What typhoons bring is storm surges. Storm surges, you can think of them as tsunamis, that are brought in because of wind speed and the oceans interacting and fae higher waves slamming the coastline.

The IPCC says ‘’decisive action’’ is needed to stop global warming and help manage ‘’unavoidable changes’’ to the planet.