New study highlights climate change's role in extreme storms

Moving on, our new study suggests that climate change and El Nino combined to intensify Hurricane Polo, helping fuel its explosive transformation into a Category 5 storm. Hurricane Polo developed into a tropical depression on 20th of September and rapidly strengthened into a hurricane within 24 hours. By 22nd of September, the National Hurricane Center had upgraded the storm to Category 5, making it one of the fastest strengthening storms observed in the eastern Pacific. In this study, scientists from World Weather Attribution and scientists from Climate Central came together to try to understand the role that climate change played in Hurricane Polo, which affected Mexico and the southwest U.S. a couple weeks ago. And what we found is that climate change made this storm stronger, so the winds were stronger. The study found that human-caused global warming driven by the burning of coal, oil and gas was the biggest contributor, adding nearly 10 km per hour to the hurricane's wind speed. Climate change made the conditions that fueled the storm 23 times more likely, while El Nino, a natural and temporary warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean, increased their likelihood by 14 times. El Nino and climate change both made this hurricane stronger. than it would have otherwise been, but the effect of climate change is even bigger than the one of El Nino. And because, of course, El Nino comes and goes, but climate change only gets worse, that means that now every hurricane that will occur in the East Pacific has at least this climate change signal making it stronger. And as long as we keep burning fossil fuels, that will only get bigger. Researchers stressed that Hurricane Polo would still have been a powerful storm even without climate change and El Nino. However, additional wind speed can significantly increase a storm's potential to cause damage. And then we also looked at the wind speed itself, where we also did find that climate change made the wind speed of this hurricane about three meters per second larger, which doesn't sound very much, but it is quite important to highlight that. Just as with driving, every additional mile per hour increases the destructive potential. It's not like a doubling of speed causes doubling of damage. It's way more than that. The study was released as a rapid analysis and has not yet undergone peer review. Polo weakened considerably before making landfall in a sparsely populated part of Mexico, limiting the focus on its rapid intensification rather than its eventual landfall impacts. Thank you.