Kerry Emanuel Quotes (13 Quotes)

The large upward surge in hurricane damage in the US, is clearly owing to the confluence of rapidly increasing coastal population with a decadal time-scale upswing in Atlantic hurricane activity,

This is the first time I have been convinced we are seeing a signal in the actual hurricane data.

This isn't rocket science. If you look at the record of hurricane activity in the Atlantic going back 100 years, you see that there are periods of high activity and periods of low activity.

I think we have a certain amount of climate change locked into the system. Even if we stop burning fossil fuel, the atmosphere and the ocean are going to take a while to respond. It's a very tough question for society. We're taking a gamble. We don't know all the global consequences.

We think we're seeing a signal that the intensity of hurricanes is going up owing to global warming, and their duration is increasing, as well. And this has us worried. In terms of the influence of this on the rest of the world, I think it can't be stressed enough that in the United States we have been enormously successful in reducing the loss of life. As horrible as Katrina has been - and it is horrible, sort of a worst-case scenario - so our problem is economic. That's our big problem. But in the rest of the world, in the developing world, the problem is loss of life.

We could see that was going to happen about the time Katrina came off the west coast of Florida,

The best way to put it is that storms are lasting longer at high intensity than they were 30 years ago.

We were criticized by the seasonal forecasters for not including the other environmental factors, like wind shear, in our analysis. We didn't do so because on time scales longer than 2-3 years, these do not seem to matter very much. This paper more or less proves this point.

I was skeptical that the increase (in hurricane intensity) would be sufficient to observe by now ... (but) the increase has been much more than we would have guessed.

The hurricanes are following the tropical ocean temperature. The tropical ocean temperature is following the Northern Hemisphere. And it's very hard now to believe that there's anything natural about that.

The temperature of the tropic oceans is warmer than it's been in 150 years,

Unfortunately, in the issue of the frequency of storms, we're still kind of in the dark. We don't understand that issue very well.

My results suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in hurricanes' destructive potential.