"There's a clear link to climate change," Granholm said in an interview. And, yet, for the first time in over a quarter century, climate change was not brought up even once at the presidential debates." Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurance firms, recently issued a study titled ‘Severe Weather in North America.' According to the press release that accompanied the report, “Nowhere in the world is the rising number of natural catastrophes more evident than in North America." While many factors are listed, including an increase in the number of people living in flood-prone areas, the report identified global warming as one of the major culprits: “Climate change particularly affects formation of heat-waves, droughts, intense precipitation events, and in the long run most probably also tropical cyclone intensity."
While detractors might say that all “weather-related loss events" cannot be directly linked to climate change, it would be quite impossible to deny that the storm fits the general extreme weather patterns around the world that can be attributed to climate change. Recent evidence in support of this view was presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America this November. Warmer than usual temperatures, sea surface temperatures, sea level rise and the redistribution of air streams and pressure pockets were all discussed and cited as the effects of climate change that exacerbated the effects of Hurricane Sandy.
Hurricanes and tropical storms occur with or without global warming. But many climate models suggest that such storms will become more intense as the effects of global warming start to take their toll.
Source: Sanctuary Asia
