eli5: I know that these most recent severe storms and disasters are undoubtedly a result of worsening climate change, but as a non-science person I don’t understand exactly how/why.
In: Planetary Science
Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane floating around the atmosphere act like a blanket around the Earth, trapping more heat in the atmosphere.
Heat in the atmosphere is the energy that powers all of our weather.
The more heat there is, the more energy there is to generate wind and evaporation, leading to bigger and more powerful storms and hurricanes.
Climate change means that the oceans are getting warmer – over the past 123 years the average surface temperature of the oceans has increased by an average of 0.19f/0.078C per decade. Warm water is the fuel that powers hurricanes – the warmer the water the faster the hurricane can “fuel” itself up.
The surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico has increased by 1C over the past 50 years and this year that surface temperature is at a record high. This is why Hurricane Helene had so much water to dump over land and why Hurricane Milton was supercharged so quickly from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane.
The “fuel” for hurricanes is warm air and warm water. The warmer the water and air, the stronger the hurricane. Climate change is making the oceans and the air warmer.
Fun fact I just graduated with a meteorology degree and I took an entire tropical meteorology course and the general consensus in the meteorology world is a warming climate actually reduces the number of hurricanes due to the atmosphere being more hostile towards hurricanes with higher amounts of wind shear. HOWEVER we were also taught when hurricanes do form they would be bigger and stronger due to the warmer ocean waters. This hurricane season is actually a perfect example of what we learned in that class…..it’s been a relatively quiet hurricane season but the storms we’ve gotten have been monsters!
Slightly more in depth answer I recently read about: while warm surface water fuels hurricanes, as others have said, cooler deeper water caps that ceiling. With climate change, the deeper water isn’t as cool as it used to be so there is less of a limit to the hurricane’s strength. the fuel isn’t just stronger, but there’s more of it, so to speak.
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