A stretch of coast from east of Houston to west of Corpus Christi and reaching as far inland as the outskirts of San Antonio was devastated by Harvey’s wind and rain this weekend, and it’s far from over. Rescue is now underway for thousands of victims and the rain it still coming down in many places. To find out what role anthropogenic climate change might play in a specific weather event, it’s always best to ask an expert, like Michael Mann, one of the top climate researchers in the world. Among his many accomplishments are the Hockey Stick and contributions to the 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth.
Mann responded via email and then summarized the details in a comprehensive post on Facebook, saying in part, “not only are the surface waters of the Gulf unusually warm right now, but there is a deep layer of warm water that Harvey was able to feed upon when it intensified at near record pace as it neared the coast. Human-caused warming is penetrating down into the ocean warming not just the surface but creating deeper layers of warm water in the Gulf and elsewhere.”
Not only did the warmer water fuel the storm’s sudden, deadly burst to a category 4 storm Friday afternoon, according to climate scientists like Mann, the larger impact of climate change on the motion of weather systems may have helped the system stay in place, hovering over the rain-soaked region, and further amplifying an already unprecedented disaster. He concluded that “Harvey was almost certainly more intense than it would have been … so, we can say it exacerbated several characteristics of the storm in a way that greatly increased the risk of damage and loss of life. So yes, in my opinion, climate change worsened the impact.”
