"This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change," Physicist Joshua Studholme, IPCC author and staff at Yale's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
For the first time in three million years, storms will expand into Earth's middle latitudes this century due to the exponential rise of Greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
In the journal Nature Geoscience, research has found that tropical storms will migrate north or south depending on which hemisphere the wind storms develop. The study highlights references to two recent hurricanes, Henri, in 2021 that barreled into Connecticut and Rhode Island and Alpha, the first recorded storm that slammed into Portugal in 2020. Due to the heating of the atmosphere and oceans, violent storms will be slower, drop heavier rainfalls, and have more powerful storm surge as a result of sea-level rise.
Sea-level rise has begun to be a threat multiplier for the world’s coastal cities with the rapid melting of the planet's ice caps and thermal expansion that will cause severe damage to the Northeast's coastal infrastructure, much of which is already in disrepair due to Republican obstruction.
While an increase in tropical cyclones is commonly cited as a harbinger of climate change, much remains unclear about how sensitive they are to the planet's average temperature. In the 1980's, study co-author Emanuel used concepts from classical thermodynamics to predict that global warming would result in more intense storms—a prediction that has been validated in the observational record.
Yet other aspects of the relationship between tropical cyclones and climate still lack physically based theory. For example, there is no agreement among scientists about whether the total number of storms will increase or decrease as the climate warms, or why the planet experiences roughly 90 such events each year.
"There are large uncertainties in how tropical cyclones will change in the future," said Fedorov. "However, multiple lines of evidence indicate that we could see more tropical cyclones in mid-latitudes, even if the total frequency of tropical cyclones does not increase, which is still actively debated. Compounded by the expected increase in average tropical cyclone intensity, this finding implies higher risks due to tropical cyclones in Earth's warming climate."
Cities such as New York, Tokyo, and Boston would all target the problematic changes made to the atmosphere and the oceans. We will see more category four and five storms as a result. There is no doubt that the world is not ready for the slow-moving asteroid that is bearing down on us.
Typically, tropical cyclones form at low latitudes that have access to warm waters from tropical oceans and away from the shearing impact of the jet streams—the west-to-east bands of wind that circle the planet. Earth's rotation causes clusters of thunderstorms to aggregate and spin up to form the vortices that become tropical cyclones. Other mechanisms of hurricane formation also exist.
As the climate warms, temperature differences between the Equator and the poles will decrease, the researchers say. In summer months, this may cause weakening or even a split in the jet stream, opening a window in the mid-latitudes for tropical cyclones to form and intensify.
Just look up and vote accordingly.
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