“Climate change” boosted rainfall attributed to Hurricane Ian by at least 10 percent, a small study based on computer modelling and laboratory scenarios claims.
The Associated Press reports the snap research, which is not peer-reviewed, was released Thursday within hours of the devastating southwest Florida event.
It compared peak rainfall rates during the real storm to about 20 different computer scenarios of a model with Hurricane Ian’s characteristics slamming into the Sunshine State in a world with no “human-caused climate change.”
“The real storm was 10% wetter than the storm that might have been,” warned Lawrence Berkeley National Lab climate scientist Michael Wehner, study co-author.
Forecasters predicted Ian will have dropped up to two feet of rain in parts of Florida in what has been called a “once in 500 years event” as Breitbart News reported.
Wehner and Kevin Reed, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University, published a study in Nature Communications earlier this year looking at the hurricanes of 2020 and found during their rainiest three-hour periods they were more than 10 percent wetter than in a world without greenhouse gases trapping heat, according to AP.
They applied the same scientifically accepted attribution technique to Hurricane Ian and were not alone in pointing to “climate change” as a key driver behind the event and its catastrophic outcomes.
Wind gusts blow across boats in the Sarasota Bay as Hurricane Ian churns to the south on September 28, 2022 in Sarasota, Florida. The storm made a U.S. landfall at Cayo Costa, Florida, as a Category 4 hurricane with wind speeds over 140 miles per hour in some areas. (Sean Rayford/Getty)
Breitbart News reported Florida Democratic gubernatorial nominee Rep. Charlie Crist said Thursday on MSNBC’s “Hallie Jackson Reports” he wanted to address “climate change” to reduce the size of storms like Hurricane Ian.
“When you compare this to Hurricane Charlie, similar strengths, obviously, but the massive size of this storm, Ian is incredible. You listed earlier in your broadcast the five major storms that are hitting the United States. Three of the five have hit Florida.
“So one factor in all of this is climate change. These storms are getting bigger, they’re getting stronger, and they’re affecting that many more lives as a result of it,” Crist declared.
MIT hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel is not so sure.
He said in general, a warmer world does make storms rainier, however he told AP he is uncomfortable drawing conclusions about individual storms.
“This business above very very heavy rain is something we’ve expected to see because of climate change,” he said. “We’ll see more storms like Ian.”