The link between climate change and hurricanes you need to know - Charleston Post Courier

The link between climate change and hurricanes you need to know | Hurricane Wire | postandcourier.com

Hurricane Florence was one of the deadliest hurricanes to hit the Carolinas in modern history. It also dumped historic amounts of rain.

Two days before the 2018 hurricane made landfall — before 11,000 South Carolinians were displaced by dramatic inland flooding — scientists were already dusting the weather models for the fingerprints of climate change.

Many South Carolina residents are unaware that the extreme weather they may have experienced during past hurricane seasons has been directly linked to human-caused warming.

As the storm approached, scientists at Stony Brook University knew ocean temperatures off the Carolina coast were 0.75°C above average. Elevated moisture hung in the air. Both variables can supercharge hurricanes. One of their pre-landfall predictions turned out to be correct: rainfall was significantly increased by warming.

The storm dumped 13 trillion gallons over the Carolinas and Virginia. But without climate change, Hurricane Florence would have dropped 10 percent less catastrophic rain.

The North Charleston Coliseum could be filled 20,000 times with the additional rain climate change infused into Hurricane Florence.

Data collected by Yale University researchers in 2021 show that, in Horry County, which experienced the most rainfall during Florence, only 60 percent of people see the link between extreme weather and climate change. Only 42 percent believe that climate change could harm them personally.

Being aware of the personal and community harm posed by climate-affected hurricanes could help residents better prepare for hurricanes that are likely to be rainier and larger in size, said Dorothy Heinrich of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.

Hurricane seasons are also becoming more unpredictable due to climate change.

The 2018 hurricane season turned out to be far worse than forecast, prompting the National Oceanic Administration to pour more resources and staff into new storm surge models.

Floodwaters from Hurricane Florence cover the Pee Dee town of Nichols Friday, Sept. 21, 2018. File/Lauren Petracca/Staff

Heinrich is a technical advisor for the world's largest humanitarian organization. She said calculating the link between climate change and major storms — often called attribution studies— is now a "robust" part of the Red Cross' work.

"It's giving us a better sense of the event we are preparing for ... and how to allocate resources for the coming decades," she said.

The first extreme weather attribution study began twenty years ago on the heels of the 2003 European heatwave that killed 70,000 people. Since then, hundreds of attribution studies have been performed.

Changes in extreme weather — such as heatwaves and major hurricanes— are one of the ways society experiences concrete events that scientists know were made worse by climate change.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication has been taking the pulse of public opinion for decades to understand how Americans view climate change, including residents of the Lowcountry who are particularly vulnerable each hurricane season.

On average, less than half of Americans say global warming will harm them personally.

"Even though, in most cases, people have already experienced the worsening impacts of climate change," said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

According to Yale's 2021 surveys, about 70 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening but more than 64 percent of people on average know that warming is affecting the weather. Zoom into South Carolina and the story is more complex.

In Charleston County, awareness of climate change and extreme weather link is about four points above the national average. But in neighboring Georgetown County, only 59 percent of residents say there is a connection, which is about 5 points less than the national average.

Residents of the Upstate — particularly Oconee, Anderson and Cherokee counties — have some of the lowest rates of climate-weather awareness in the Palmetto state.

The South is a patchwork of people who underestimated the mark of climate change on intense storms and folks who are well aware.

In Miami-Dade County, almost 70 percent of people say that climate change is affecting their extreme weather. In 1992, the Miami area was hit by Hurricane Andrew, the most destructive storm of the 20th century.

Going back to the 1970s, human-caused warming has increased the likelihood of a tropical cyclone developing into a major hurricane by about 8 percent per decade. The latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change determined that the proportion of very intense — category 4 or higher — tropical cyclones is projected to increase globally with continued warming.

Climate-charged hurricanes have been making landfall for years. That won't stop anytime soon. Prepare accordingly.