Climate change may have been responsible for more than a third of the direct damage to homes and property caused by the super typhoon that struck southern China last month, a study has concluded.
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A warming Earth also made Ragasa – the strongest storm recorded this year – more powerful when it made landfall in Guangdong province, according to researchers from Imperial College London.
They added that as the planet continued to warm, tropical cyclones were expected to become increasingly destructive.
“In the case of Ragasa, a category three at landfall [under the scale used to measure Atlantic hurricanes], we estimate that this type of event was about 49 per cent more likely compared to pre-industrial times,” the rapid attribution study from Imperial’s Grantham Institute found.
“We also estimate that about a third (36 per cent) of the damage in south China of a ‘Ragasa’ type typhoon can be attributed to climate change compared to the pre-industrial baseline.”
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Climate change, primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, boosted Ragasa’s winds by 7 per cent and rainfall by 12 per cent at landfall, the scientists added.