Fires, droughts and hurricanes: What’s the link between climate change and natural disasters?.
To what extent does climate change influence them?
Here are a few ways researchers think that climate change’s effects could play out.
Hurricanes SEA LEVEL RISE AND STORM SURGE: As sea levels continue to rise due to global warming, they’re increasing the risk of storm surge — the dangerously high floods caused by a storm pushing water onshore.
For hurricanes, that can be really dangerous, given the deaths and damage caused by rain and storm-surge flooding, Emanuel said.
This potentially helps increase drought conditions, said Lai-yung Ruby Leung, a climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
READY TO BLOW: Where there’s drought, there’s often fire, and for similar reasons — global warming means less soil moisture on average, which means that stuff burns more easily.
MOVING UP THE MOUNTAIN: As the average global temperature continues to rise, cold-loving trees like pines and spruces may need higher elevations to stay at the cooler temperatures they’re adapted to survive in.
Final note As a rule, climate scientists are generally loathe to say that any particular fire, flood, drought or hurricane was caused by climate change — but they can point to the general likelihood that such extreme events might occur, or the complex ways in which they’re influenced, by climate change.
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