How Global Warming Made Hurricane Milton More Intense and Destructive

by · NY Times

How Global Warming Made Hurricane Milton More Intense and Destructive

Greenhouse gas emissions added rain, intensified winds and doubled the storm’s potential property damage, scientists estimated.

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Milton may have caused roughly twice as much property damage as a similarly rare storm would have in a cooler world.
Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times

By Raymond Zhong

Hurricane Milton walloped Florida with at least 20 percent more rain and 10 percent stronger winds than a similarly rare storm would have done in a world that humans hadn’t warmed by burning fossil fuels, scientists said on Friday.

As a result, Milton may have caused roughly twice as much property damage as that hypothetical storm in a cooler world, a separate team of researchers estimated.

Neither group’s analysis has undergone academic peer review yet. The first, by the World Weather Attribution research collaboration, relies on methods the group has used to estimate the influence of climate change on other extreme weather events, including Hurricane Helene last month.

Warmer air can take up more moisture. So as humans heat the planet, storms like Milton can carry larger cargoes of rain. Warmer seawater also imbues hurricanes with more energy as they traverse the ocean, allowing their winds to strengthen rapidly.

The second analysis, by researchers at Imperial College London, sought to estimate how much more economic loss a storm like Milton could cause compared with a similarly infrequent storm in an alternate version of today’s world, one with the same level of development and hurricane readiness, but without planet-warming emissions.

The researchers drew upon information from previous studies of how the property damage from past hurricanes that hit the United States varied in response to where the storms came ashore and their maximum wind speeds.

High winds aren’t the only cause of destruction during a hurricane: Flooding, storm surge and tornadoes matter, too. But small-seeming jumps in a hurricane’s wind speeds can translate into big increases in damage, said Ralf Toumi, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who worked on the analysis.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a hurricane’s potential damage in the United States rises by roughly a factor of four for every increase in the storm’s category rating. Milton made landfall this week as a Category 3 storm.

Think about it this way, Dr. Toumi said: In the chaos of a hurricane, the damage multiplies. The winds turn debris — or, say, the roof of your neighbor’s house — into flying projectiles.

“If that roof hits your roof, you’re in trouble,” Dr. Toumi said. “It’s just a cascading of problems.”

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