(Bloomberg) -- Greenhouse gas pollution is making hurricanes more powerful, and Hurricane Milton is no exception, according to an overnight analysis by the climate science group World Weather Attribution. It suggests that a day’s worth of rainfall from a storm of Milton’s scale is 20% to 30% more intense and twice as likely as it would have been in a world without climate change. The planet is now 1.3C hotter than it was before industrialization.
Using a climate model to replicate similar storms, the team also found that maximum wind speeds, in a hotter world, are about 10% stronger than they would have been otherwise.
“In other words,” they write, “without climate change Milton would have made landfall as a Category 2 instead of a Category 3 storm.”
The analysis was produced so quickly — a day after landfall — that local weather datasets were not yet updated for the researchers to consult. The team relied instead on existing data histories to estimate how much more more likely, and more intense, rainfall volumes that have a 1% and 10% chance of happening in any given year. The odds of Milton-like wind speeds occurring have increased by 40%.
These results, not specific to Milton but representative of it, “are in line with those of Hurricane Helene” and other storms that have undergone more comprehensive analysis.
World Weather Attribution in recent years has become the standard-bearer for rapid climate analyses of extreme weather events. On Wednesday, it released a similar study of Hurricane Helene, finding that Helene brought 10% more rain and saw its winds at landfall ramped up by 11% due to the influence of a hotter atmosphere. Warm oceans are hurricane fuel. Milton’s path through the Gulf of Mexico has been 1C hotter than it might have been without climate change, which made that ocean heat 400 to 800 times likelier.
Back-to-back major hurricanes fit the profile of something climate scientists have been increasingly warning about. “Compound events” — a catch-all phrase encompassing many scenarios of multiple disasters that unfold simultaneously or sequentially — are becoming more common as risks and vulnerabilities rise most everywhere.
The new study lauds Florida’s record of hurricane-resistance measures, including two updates to the state’s building codes since Category 5 Hurricane Michael hit the the northern panhandle in 2018. A 2021 initiative, the Resilient Florida Program, disburses grants to local officials so they can diagnose and fix climate vulnerabilities in their counties, towns and cities.
More powerful storms means more damage and higher costs. Climate change may be responsible for nearly half of the direct damage caused by Helene and Milton to homes and buildings, according an economic impacts analysis conducted by researchers at Imperial College London. This rapid review attributing damage to greenhouse gas pollution is the first of its kind, according to the authors.
The work relies on the historical relationship between wind speed and damage and builds on the scientists’ rapid scientific study of the weather history. The damage review “is a simplification of the expected losses in Florida,” they write, and does not account for longer-term economic implications of health impacts or productivity loss.
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