A peek...

Hurricane Ian is a peek into the future

By ADAM ATON

Floridians bracing for Hurricane Ian are watching it rapidly intensify into a monster storm.

Ian strengthened into a Category 3 hurricane early Tuesday morning, after spending the weekend as a tropical storm — the quickest intensification of any Atlantic hurricane this year.

Such a frightening acceleration of wind, waves and rain is exactly what we should expect from a warming climate, E&E News’ Chelsea Harvey writes. As temperatures rise, scientists say hurricanes will likely intensify faster and more often.

That’s a big problem, because the faster a hurricane intensifies, the less time people have to prepare. The National Weather Service warned today that Ian could make landfall on the west coast of Florida six to 12 hours earlier Wednesday than previously forecast.

Cuba experienced Ian’s 120-mph winds earlier today. The hurricane sheared roofs from homes and cut power to hundreds of thousands of people, according to Reuters.

Rapid intensification is nothing new. When a storm passes over warm waters with favorable winds, it grows stronger.

But climate change promises to make those conditions even more common.

Warmer oceans are one of the most certain impacts of carbon pollution. That means more storms will intensify — resulting in more rain, higher storm surges and more major hurricanes.

It’s not so much that climate change makes any single storm worse, said Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in hurricanes. It’s that it creates the conditions for all future storm seasons to be worse.

Emanuel explained the distinction this way: If your grandmother smoked two packs of cigarettes daily and then died of lung cancer, there’s a seemingly obvious connection. But proving that smoking directly caused her death is another matter.

“There are plenty of people who die from lung cancer that never smoked, and plenty of people who smoked and lived into their 90s,” he said.

Likewise, he said, hurricanes have "many, many, many influences — among which is climate change.”

But that’s all the more reason to focus on climate, he said, because it’s one of the few things influencing hurricanes that people can influence, too.

“It’s systematic, and it acts over a long time,” he said.