"We, as human beings, have our fingerprints all over these hurricanes," says Daniel Gilford, the lead author of the study and a climate scientist at Climate Central, a non-profit research organization in Princeton, New Jersey. "If we can boost up the temperatures of the sea surface, we can also boost up how quickly a hurricane can spin."
The study adds to a growing body of research showing that global warming amplifies hurricanes. Rising seas caused by global warming are also intensifying hurricanes, research has shown. And the storms are striking earlier in the season and producing greater rainfall than past hurricanes have done.
Climate change sharply intensified almost 85% of hurricanes that hit the North Atlantic between 2019 and 2023... the wind speed of those hurricanes rose by an average of nearly 30 kilometres per hour - enough to have pushed 30 storms up a level on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.
This year's Atlantic hurricane season has been devastating. For example, Hurricane Helene, which tore through the southeastern United States in August, dropped almost 80 centimetres of rain in some locations. The storm killed more than 200 people and inflicted as much as US$250 billion of damage - a figure that would vault Helene ahead of 2005's Hurricane Katrina as the most expensive hurricane to slam the United States.
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