All Climate Events

Tuesday, February 13, 2018. 12:00PM. Webinar: The Hurricanes of 2017: Weather as Usual or an Ominous Sign? Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sponsored by Center for Satellite Research and Applications. More information here.

Hurricane Harvey, Irma and Maria each set some disturbing meteorological records and collectively did more than $300 billion in damage, more than half the total annual budget of the U.S. Department of Defense. Are these storms simply part of natural chaotic weather variability, or have they been affected by human-caused climate change? To answer these questions, we turn to the basic theory of hurricanes and novel way of estimating hurricane risk around the world and use these techniques to estimate how the underlying probabilities of events like Harvey, Irma, and Maria have changed and will continue to change over the course of this century, absent any measures to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.