by Eleanor Ball
Extremely strong hurricanes seem to have become a mainstay of summer news over the last few years, thanks in part to climate change. But climate change may not just be affecting hurricanes by making them stronger--it may also be making them stick around longer once they hit land, according to a recent paper from Nature.
Usually, once hurricanes make landfall, their energy begins to decay. Without being able to draw on water to power them, they can’t sustain themselves and eventually die out. However, hurricanes don’t just use moisture from ocean waters to power them--they also use heat. As climate change leads to increasingly warm oceans, there’s more heat--aka power--for hurricanes to pick up on, allowing them to sustain themselves on land for a longer time before they die out. Also, warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air, so hurricanes forming from these warmer ocean waters frequently come with much heavier rainfall. To put some numbers on it, in 1967, hurricanes usually dissipated by 76% within a day of hitting land. But by 2018, that number had dropped to 52%.
Besides the obvious effects on coastal areas, which, in addition to facing fiercer hurricanes, are also facing hurricanes that last longer, there are negative implications for inland areas as well. As hurricanes take longer to dissipate, inland areas experience more intense winds, along with heavy rainfall. These inland areas are unprepared to deal with intense hurricanes, making them especially economically and infrastructurally vulnerable in this era of newly powerful hurricanes. When infrastructure is damaged during a hurricane, the recovery time increases. Even when physical structures are mostly what’s damaged, there can be snowballing effects on other essential aspects of infrastructure, such as power, cell service, and communication.
The infrastructural damage and resultant loss in productivity and consumption also leads to negative impacts on local economies. In fact, the economic impact of hurricanes on inland areas has been steadily rising for over a hundred years. For example, temporary disruptions in production can result when a hurricane strikes. Other effects, such as permanent destruction of crops, may have a longer-lasting impact. This can be seen in decreases in the economic growth rate for impacted counties and sometimes even increases in the state-level unemployment rate. All these effects, both economic and infrastructural, are exacerbated by hurricanes that stick around longer and are fiercer.
On top of all the other signs we’ve seen this year, such as the record-breaking temperatures and Australian and Californian wildfires, this research is yet another sign that climate change has real, devastating effects. In the last year, we at GW have seen the power ground-up climate advocacy can have, as Sunrise GW successfully spearheaded a movement to pressure GW to divest the endowment from fossil fuels by 2025. The campus was peppered with signs and buzzing with conversation. Climate change and natural disasters can sometimes seem like immense issues too overwhelming to tackle, but we’ve seen concrete examples of the power that grassroots work and small groups have to implement real change. With that kind of energy, we can work to fight for a more safe and sustainable world for ourselves and the next generation.
Eleanor Ball is a GW Scope staff writer and social sciences editor for the George Washington Undergraduate Review. She is a sophomore majoring in Public Health and double minoring in Sociocultural Anthropology and English. Her most recent research is a project conducted with her county health department during the summer of 2020 to study local racial disparities in the COVID-19 pandemic. At GW, she is also on the boards of the GW Shakespeare Company and the Student Theatre Council.
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