This year's unusually intense period of destructive weather activity could be a harbinger of what is to come as the effects of global warming grow even more pronounced, according to a briefing at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
The recent onslaught of four major tropical weather disturbances that did so much damage in the United States and Haiti have prompted questions about the relationship between hurricanes and global warming. Although experts cannot say that climate change will result in more hurricanes in the future, growing evidence suggests that the tropical storms that do happen will be more intense than in the past.
“Scientists cannot say at present whether more or fewer hurricanes will occur in the future,” said Paul R. Epstein, M.D., associate director of the center. “However, even if the number of storms remained constant, more powerful hurricanes with stronger winds, higher storm surges, and heavier downpours would have an even greater potential for damage, including increased risks to human life and public health, more floods and mud slides, increased coastal erosion, and damage to coastal buildings and infrastructure. This is the pattern that we already may be seeing related to the overall increase in extremes.”
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