What Scientists Know About Climate Change and Hurricanes: QuickTake Q&A

These days, as soon as winds hit 74 miles per hour or barometric pressure drops below 990 millibars, people want to know: Is climate change behind this hurricane? It’s an even more pressing question when a giant storm like Harvey is followed by an even more gigantic one like Irma, which itself is being followed by Jose and Katia. Climate scientists continue to wrestle with the connection between global warming and individual storms, but they’re more confident than ever that there’s some linkage.

Climate scientists are increasingly comfortable connecting global warming to the unprecedentedly high ocean temperatures that fuel some storms. Scientists in Germany and the U.K. drew a direct link between global warming and the intensity of Irma and the destructiveness of Harvey. Climate change can’t be blamed for the existence of these two juggernauts -- there have always been hurricanes, after all -- but it does shape the remarkable conditions they’re occurring in. The fuel for tropical storms is ocean heat, and each storm’s top winds have a theoretical speed limit, determined by how much of that fuel is in their tank.