There aren’t more of the storms now than there were roughly 150 years ago, a study suggests
It’s a question that scientists continue to grapple with, says Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University. “What is the impact of global warming — past impact and also our future impact — on the number and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms?”Satellite records over the last 30 years allow us to say “with little ambiguity how many hurricanes, and how many major hurricanes [Category 3 and above] there were each year,” Vecchi says. Those data clearly show that the number, intensity and speed of intensification of hurricanes has increased over that time span.
But “there are a lot of things that have happened over the last 30 years” that can influence that trend, he adds. “Global warming is one of them.”
