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New Video: Hot Ocean, Hurricanes, Houston, and Harvey
Posted on 5 June 2018 by greenman3610
This is a re-post from Climate Denial Crock of the Week
Kevin Trenberth has a new paper, measuring the change in ocean heat content in the Gulf of Mexico as Hurricane Harvey passed over. Turns out the heat-loss just matches the energy of precipitation that made Harvey an unprecedented catastrophe.
Dr. Trenberth’s co-authors Lijing Cheng of China’s Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and Peter Jacobs of George Mason University round out this explainer. Short and powerful demonstration of how scientists more and more understand the link between a warming planet and specific extreme events.
I hope to post more soon from the brilliant interviews I captured for this piece – Lijing Cheng and Peter Jacobs are climate comms stars.
Related research: Climate scientists: A global increase in the most intense tropical storms due to global warming is not just predicted by models but is already happening.
According to this research, theres's already been a 100% increase in the frequency of category 4 hurricanes, and a 300% increase in the frequency of category five hurricanes. Ouch!
Correction: The 100% and 300% increase is for "tropical storms worldwide"
nigelj@2: I think you're right the first time, and thanks for posting that astounding finding (I think hurricanes are just a class of 'tropical storm' with max windspeed >119 km/h).