Hurricanes Are Getting Worse

As Hurricane Dorian continues its slow move up the east coast, nerves are fraying from Florida northward into the Hampton Roads area.  WAVY TV is reporting as follows this morning:

Tuesday night, the Commander of the U.S. 2nd Fleet said U.S. Navy ships in the Hampton Roads area will begin to leave on Wednesday under a “Sortie Condition Alpha.” “Based on the current track of the storm, we made the decision to begin to sortie our Hampton Roads-based ships and aircraft tomorrow,” said Vice Adm. Andrew Lewis, Commander, U.S. 2nd Fleet. “This allows time for our assets to transit safely out of the path of the storm.”

As long time residents know, this is never an encouraging sign, especially with military leaders concerned about winds in excess of 50 knots.  The bigger issue, however, is that hurricanes are getting stronger and more intense.  Why?  Climate change, a term members of the Republican Party resists even uttering.  A column in the New York Times makes the case that it is insanity to talk about hurricanes without acknowledging what climate changes is doing to the intensity of storms.  Here are column excerpts:

The frequency of severe hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean has roughly doubled over the last two decades, and climate change appears to be the reason. Yet much of the conversation about Hurricane Dorian — including most media coverage — ignores climate change.

That’s a mistake. It’s akin to talking about lung cancer and being afraid to mention smoking, or talking about traffic deaths and being afraid to talk about drunken driving.
Climate change, likewise, doesn’t cause any one hurricane on its own, but it’s central to the story of the storms that are increasingly battering the Atlantic. Why are we pretending otherwise?

For more: I find the National Climate Assessment reports — cautious documents, written by a federal panel of scientists — to be helpful in understanding the role that climate change does (and doesn’t) play in influencing the weather. Those reports explain that the warming of the planet does not appear to be increasing the total number of hurricanes. But it does seem to be making those storms stronger and causing them to produce much more rain.

Warmer air and seawater cause storms “to rapidly reach and maintain very high intensity,” the scientists have written. Over the last few years, hurricane activity has been “anomalous and, in one case, unprecedented.”

Dorian became a Category 4 hurricane on Friday, before reaching Category 5 — the most severe designation — over the weekend and then falling back to Category 4 on Monday. Both Categories 4 and 5 qualify a hurricane as severe, and Dorian is the first Atlantic storm to reach that status this year. The heart of hurricane season often lasts from August to October.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, a typical year had only one severe hurricane. In this century, the average number has roughly doubled, . . . . And because global warming is intensifying, scientists expect the number of extreme storms to continue rising.

It's impossible to set responsible policies if one refuses to admit the reality of what is happening.  Yet the GOP continues to refuse to accept scientific fact.