Smoke hangs over the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge in San Francisco, the US, on September 9 2020. Picture: BLOOMBERG/DAVID PAUL MORRISThe planet is showing signs it is in peril. In recent weeks, the world has seen ferocious wildfires in the US west, torrential rains in Africa, weirdly warm temperatures on the surface of tropical oceans, and record heatwaves from California to the Siberian Arctic.
Advances in a relatively new field known as “event attribution science” have enabled researchers to assess how big a role climate change might have played in a specific case. Hurricanes overall are getting stronger and spinning slower, as they pick up energy from the heat in the oceans ... a study last month that found climate change could make extreme hurricane rainfall in the Caribbean five times more likely, without rapid cuts in emissions
“It’s not so much that climate change is destabilising historical weather patterns,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California. “In many cases, it’s amplifying them.” In the US, warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico boosted Hurricane Laura to a category 4 storm in the last hours before it slammed into Louisiana with 240km/h winds. Governor John Bel Edwards described it as the most powerful hurricane to strike the state, surpassing even Katrina in 2005.