As Gustav, Hanna, Ike, and Josephine become household names, more research has been added to the ongoing debate over the impact of climate change on hurricanes. A new study published in Nature indicates that warming seas have not increased the intensity of your everyday hurricane, but have made the mightiest storms even mightier. In essence, “if the seas continue to warm, we can expect to see stronger storms in the future,” says lead author James Elsner, who says the findings are consistent with hurricane models. As always, plenty of research remains to be done. The new study provides “a very suggestive result and a very interesting result,” says Dr. Thomas Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “but it’s not a definitive smoking gun for a greenhouse warming signal on hurricanes.”
