From Climate News Network
Any climate change at all will mean a hurricane risk for the storm-prone Caribbean, even if global average temperatures are contained to a rise of no more than 1.5°C by 2100. But a rise of 2°C could be disastrous: the hurricane hazard could grow fivefold.
The figures – each representing a rise above the long-term average for most of human history – are significant. In 2015 195 nations, including the US, signed up to the Paris Agreement – a promise to contain the rise in global heating to “well below 2°C” by the century’s end. The undeclared but widely-understood intention was a limit of 1.5°C.
In the last century, in response to a rise in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use, planetary average temperatures have already risen by 1°C, and the Atlantic states of the US and the islands of the Caribbean have been hit by a series of ever more devastating windstorms, as ocean temperatures warm and make hurricanes more probable.
And researchers warn that as global heating continues – with forecasts of a rise of more than 3°C by 2100 – more are on the way.
But the US is wealthy and resilient. British scientists report in the journal Environmental Research Letters that they decided to take a look at the probability of windstorm and heavy rainfall assault on the Caribbean, where half of the 44 million people of the archipelago live within 1.5kms of the coast, and where devastation can be so intense it could take six years to recover.
The poorer and more vulnerable you are, the greater your hurricane risk. Even a tiny heat rise can spell disaster.
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