‘Climate change fueled’ deadly Typhoon Gaemi

LONDON

Climate change turbocharged the winds and rain of Typhoon Gaemi, which killed dozens of people across the Philippines, Taiwan and China earlier this year, a group of scientists said on Thursday.

Gaemi skirted the Philippines in July, triggering floods and landslides that killed at least 40 people, before making landfall in Taiwan and China.

In China, the weather system caused torrential downpours that killed 50 people and prompted authorities to evacuate 300,000.

World Weather Attribution (WWA), a network of scientists who have pioneered peer-reviewed methods for assessing the role of climate change in extreme events, looked at three regions worst affected by the typhoon: The northern Philippines, Taiwan and China's Hunan province.

It found the system's wind speeds were 7 percent more intense due to man-made climate change, and its rainfall was 14 percent heavier in Taiwan and 9 percent heavier in Hunan.

The study could not draw definitive conclusions about the role of climate change on the rainfall in the Philippines, because of the region's complex monsoon rain patterns.

Still, they found the warm seas that helped form and fuel Typhoon Gaemi "would have been virtually impossible" in a world that had not warmed to the current 1.2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

And the group's modelling found this warming has already increased the number of similarly strong storms by 30 percent, up from around 5 a year to 6 or 7.

"This study confirms what we've expected: Hotter seas and atmospheres are giving rise to more powerful, longer-lived and deadlier typhoons," said Ralf Toumi, director of the Grantham Institute-Climate Change and the Environment, at Imperial College London.