THE EARTH HATH NO FURY LIKE CYCLONES DISRUPTED, NEW STUDIES SAY

'We're underestimating the scale of what's coming. The changing cyclone patterns could have enormous consequences,' a weather scientist said

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Cyclones are among the earth’s most powerful storms. Like forest fires and lightning strikes, they are natural — yet their effects are becoming more destructive thanks to climate change.

In a new study published by researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the world’s cyclones can be expected to wreak more havoc in new ways if global warming follows a future climate scenario called SSP5-8.5.

This is both due to the cyclones’ intensity and their occurring in places where they didn’t occur before.

Climate change has many moving parts. To make sense of its impact on various sectors and ecosystems, experts often use the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs). Each SSP describes a world affected in a particular way by climate change. SSP3 describes a politically fragmented world in which environmental protection is not a priority. The SSP5 world is rapidly burning fossil fuels and depleting a great amount of resources.

SSP5-8.5 is the SSP5 pathway plus a radiative forcing — the amount of extra energy being added to the planet’s surface — of 8.5 W/m2. Currently this figure is 2.7 W/m2 over the value in 1750. (A radiative forcing of 2.6 W/m2 is required to keep global warming by 2100 under 2° C, as suggested by the Paris Agreement.)

“Based on the data, SSP5 is already gaining momentum,” said Chahan Kropf, a scientist specialising in weather and climate risk studies at ETH Zürich and a coauthor of both studies. “But we still need broader agreement on that.”

A follow-up study published by the same team plus two more researchers also reported that roughly half of the world’s mangroves will be at high to severe risk by 2100. Coastal ecosystems protect inland areas from storms, reduce soil erosion, and store carbon. Mangroves in particular can also store fourto five-times more carbon per unit area than terrestrial forests.