A devastating typhoon that tore through the Philippines, Taiwan and China last month, destroying infrastructure and leaving more than 100 people dead, was made significantly worse by human-induced climate change, according to a report by a group of climate scientists.
Releasing their report on Thursday just as another typhoon made landfall in Japan, the researchers said warmer seas were providing extra “fuel” for tropical storms in Asia, making them more dangerous.
Typhoon Gaemi swept across East Asia beginning on July 22, with more than 300 millimetres of rainfall falling on the Philippine capital, Manila, in just one day.
Wind speeds as high as 232 kilometres per hour drove storm waves that sank an oil tanker off the Philippine coast, as well as a cargo ship near Taiwan. Rain from Gaemi also caused fatal mudslides in the Chinese province of Hunan.
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Typhoon Gaemi’s wind speeds were about 14kph more intense and its rainfall was up to 14 per cent higher as a result of warmer sea temperatures, according to the report from World Weather Attribution, an alliance of researchers that analyse the relationship between climate change and extreme weather.
The organisation is a global leader in rapid attribution studies, a relatively new field of science that allows researchers to study the links between rising temperatures and specific extreme events.
“With global temperatures rising, we are already witnessing an increase in these ocean temperatures, and as a result, more powerful fuel is being made available for these tropical cyclones, increasing their intensity,” Nadia Bloemendaal, researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, told a briefing on Wednesday ahead of the report’s release.
At the same briefing, Clair Barnes, a research associate at London’s Grantham Institute, said typhoons were now 30 per cent more likely to occur compared to the pre-industrial age, and warned that they will become even more common and intense if global temperature increases reach 2 degrees Celsius.
East Asia is accustomed to extreme weather, but its flood-prevention infrastructure and emergency response planning are coming under increasing pressure, said Maja Vahlberg, a climate risk consultant with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.
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