The devastating winds and torrential rains that Hurricane Milton delivered to Florida were made far worse by human-induced climate change, a team of international researchers reported on Friday.
Record-high global temperatures, boosted by the burning of fossil fuels, helped power the storm as it traveled across the balmy waters of the Gulf of Mexico, according to the World Weather Attribution group’s analysis released Friday morning. Those conditions boosted Milton’s rainfall between 20 to 30 percent and wind speed by 10 percent compared with a scenario without human-caused climate change.
“[T]he results are compatible with those obtained for other hurricanes in the area that have been studied in the scientific literature,” the researchers wrote. “We are therefore confident that such changes in heavy rainfall are attributable to human-caused climate change.”
The type of torrential rainfall from storms like Milton was twice as likely because of the 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming the world has experienced since the middle of the 19th century, WWA said. Milton delivered nearly 19 inches of rain in St. Petersburg, causing what meteorologists described as a 1-in-500-year flood in the city that sits on a peninsula at the mouth of Tampa Bay.