Cape & Islands News

2 studies tie stronger hurricanes to global warming

MIT and Purdue researchers reach same conclusions
Home insurance premiums to rise 20-30% with hurricane deductibles

Stories today in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle report that global warming is a direct cause of the recent, stronger hurricanes to hit the U.S. coast.

Climate researchers at Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology separately reported new evidence Tuesday supporting the idea that global warming is causing stronger hurricanes.

That claim is the subject of a long-running scientific dispute. And while the new research supports one side, neither the authors nor other climate experts say it is conclusive.

In one new paper, to appear in a coming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Matthew Huber of the Purdue department of earth and atmospheric sciences and Ryan Sriver, a graduate student there, calculate the damage that could be caused by storms worldwide, using data normally applied to reconciling weather forecast models with observed weather events.

The Purdue scientists found that their results matched earlier work by Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane expert at MIT. Emanuel has argued that global warming, specifically the warming of the tropical oceans, is already increasing the power expended by hurricanes.

The WSJ story warned that the developments along our own coastline since the disastrous 1938 storm makes our region far more vulnerable today.

The WSJ story begins,

Bracing for the Worst
Believed at Risk of a Major Hurricane, Northeast Chafes as Insurers Pull Out

Nearly 70 years ago, a violent hurricane ripped across the south shore of Long Island, then largely farmland. The storm, locally dubbed the Long Island Express, sent 30- to 50-foot waves surging ashore, killing 50 people and 750,000 chickens in the Long Island counties of Nassau and Suffolk.

Tomorrow, a new hurricane season is set to begin, with the ever-present threat that a mammoth storm could deviate from recent patterns making landfall in the Southeast and follow a path similar to that of the Long Island Express. But where chickens scratched in 1938 now sit some of the most expensive homes in the U.S. As a result, the insurance  market here is showing glimmers of the kind of fragility that has plagued places like Florida.

The story goes on to state that home insurance premiums are going up as much as 20% to 30%, and hurricane deductibles may follow.

Read the stories here, here and here, and comment below.