Tropical cyclones becoming more powerful, destructive due to climate change — UN

MONACO — Climate change has made tropical storms bigger and stronger, and will continue to amplify their destructive potential over the coming decades even if global warming is capped at two degrees Celsius, a major UN report said Wednesday. 

The total number of storms—known as hurricanes, typhoons or cyclones, depending on the region—may not increase, but the proportion that reach top-level Category 4 or 5 will, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported.

Crumbling ice sheets, rising seas, melting glaciers, ocean dead zones, toxic algae blooms—a raft of impacts on sea and ice are incubating these superstorms that will ravage some megacities every year, according to the landmark assessment approved by the 195-nation IPCC.

Some of these impacts are irreversible.

The report, a digest of 7,000 peer-reviewed studies, is a sobering reminder that record greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from burning fossil fuels, are driving the planet towards a hothouse climate our species could find intolerable.

But it also raises more clearly than ever before a red flag on the need to confront changes that can no longer be averted. — Agence France-Presse