Hurricane IdaA Preview of What’s to Come: Climate Change Helped Intensify Hurricane Ida
Hurricane Ida started as a disturbance in the Atlantic Ocean quickly grew to what could be the worst hurricane to hit Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While scientists are uncertain whether climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes, one thing is clear: Climate change is here, and it’s making these storms stronger and more destructive.
By the time Hurricane Ida made landfall on Sunday morning, the storm had strengthened dramatically. Picking up intensity overnight as it moved over warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico, it hit the Louisiana coast as a Category 4 hurricane.
What started as a disturbance in the Atlantic Ocean quickly grew to what could be the worst hurricane to hit Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While scientists are uncertain whether climate change will increase the frequency of hurricanes, one thing is clear: Climate change is here, and it’s making these storms stronger and more destructive.
“Until recently, it was common to think of climate change as a problem for future generations, saying people in the future will have to deal with it,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor in the College of Geosciences at Texas A&M University. “But now it’s quite clear that we are the people of the future. The future has arrived, and we are having to deal with it now.”
Be it Hurricane Ida or the wildfires that continue to burn across California, climate change is making disasters more destructive, more expensive and more impactful on humans, he said.
According to the United Nation’s latest climate report published earlier this month, it is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land, and it’s already affecting weather and climate extremes around the world. Dessler calls the report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change a confirmation of what scientists have suspected for decades.
He explains that the effects of climate change on storm severity manifests in several ways. Most obviously, rising sea levels have led to higher storm surges. Hotter temperatures create more water vapor in the atmosphere, which in turn means more rainfall. Perhaps less intuitively, he said, warmer water also means stronger winds. It all makes for a more destructive hurricane, as was the case with Ida.
Take Hurricanes Laura, Michael and Harvey, for example, which hit the U.S. in just the last few years. Before Harvey, he said, a storm producing 60 inches of rain over the course of a three or four days would have been “unimaginable.”
