Aug. 22, 2007 — If Earth is running a fever, then hurricanes like Dean and Katrina are her febrile seizures. As the rise in global temperature has accelerated over the last century, these tempestuous spasms have become more frequent and violent.
Each new spinning storm is also finding ever more victims populating its coastal targets — whether it be Mississippi or Madagascar, Kingston or Connecticut — and more ways to trigger trouble thousands of miles inland by way of an ever-more interdependent, globalized economy.
Climatologists and hurricane scientists now have little doubt there is a connection between hurricanes and global warming. Some of the strongest evidence comes from 100 years of records on Atlantic hurricanes — the most complete archive of its kind for any ocean basin. That record shows hurricanes have been increasing in a stepwise fashion since 1900.
