Human-caused climate change made the record-smashing 2020 Atlantic hurricane season even wetter.
A new study on the record busy hurricane year found it was 5% rainier than it would have been had there been no global warming from the burning of fossil fuels.
There were a record 30 named storms in 2020 and 11 of them — also a record — made landfall in the United States. The first study to look for a climate change fingerprint on an entire hurricane season found that the storms that reached hurricane status were 8% wetter.
Six hurricanes that impacted the United States in 2020 caused more than $1 billion in damages, the National Hurricane Center reported.
Scientists compared the reality to a computer-simulated world without climate change.
The projection says as the world warms up, hurricanes could become rainier.
“This work is also consistent with a recent assessment of at least a ‘medium-to-high confidence’ that an increase the projected future impacts of climate change on global tropical cyclone precipitation rates to be 7% per °C,” the research’s authors said.