Cont'
There’s essentially no agreement on what a warming climate will do to smaller hurricanes in the Category 1 or 2 range, Emanuel said. Historically, these less intense storms form far more often than major storms, and they dominate the raw numbers of hurricanes that form each year (although major hurricanes still cause by far the most damage). But “we just don’t know if the number of those smaller storms will be more or fewer or stay the same.”
Climatologists also don’t know what will happen to the
diameter of hurricanes. The size of hurricanes is an overlooked but important aspect of a storm’s danger, Emanuel said. For instance, Hurricane Ian made landfall
in almost the same place that Hurricane Charley did in 2004, but Ian is a much wider—and thus a much more destructive—storm. Charley, in fact, could
almost fit entirely within Ian’s eye. Idealized computer models show that climate change will likely make these monster storms more common, Emanuel said, but so far “nobody wants to carry that over to the real world,” which is far more complex than a simulation.
So what can we say about climate change’s effect on Ian? Stepping back, it seems safe to say that it showed some symptoms of climate change. It rapidly intensified. It dumped huge amounts of rain. You could even argue that it showed evidence of that “higher speed limit.” But asking questions beyond that is folly, Emanuel said.
“I don’t like the question ‘How did climate change affect this storm?’” he told me. “If you had a grandparent who died of lung cancer and who smoked two packs a day, you wouldn’t ask, ‘How much did smoking contribute to his lung cancer?’ Because sometimes people get lung cancer without smoking at all. You just can’t answer that question.”
So we must wonder: Is our present day hysteria over Beryl just a re-iteration of the one we indulged in over Ian?
arstechnica.com
