US President Joe Biden was asked if Storm Helene was a “consequence of climate change”, to which he responded: “Absolutely, positively, unequivocally, yes, yes, yes, yes”.
FactCheck takes a look.
Was Hurricane Helene caused by climate change?
Storm Helene has caused recent devastation across parts of the southeastern US, with floods destroying homes and a death toll of at least 135 people.
But the question of whether or not it was caused by climate change isn’t as simple an answer as the President gave.
As professor Chris Budd from the University of Bath’s department of mathematical sciences told FactCheck: “We can certainly say, and there is plenty of evidence for this, that the warming of the Earth due to human related climate change, leads to a higher likelihood of seeing extreme weather such as the recent hurricane.
“This is not a one off event, we are seeing more and more of these violent storms as a direct result of climate change.”
But Ben Clarke, researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute of Climate Change and the Environment, noted: “Climate change cannot be the sole driver or cause of a hurricane – very powerful hurricanes have always occurred, even before humans warmed the climate.”
Although he echoes that climate change “does make many hurricanes more intense and more likely”.
He explained that in a 1.3°C cooler world without climate change, Hurricane Helene’s winds “would have been less powerful, and it would have dropped less rainfall,” adding that “even small increases in hurricane rainfall and wind speeds can translate to massive increases in damages”.
And professor Stuart Haszeldine, co-director at the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, told FactCheck that although “it’s not possible to make a direct causal link between a single short duration event”, for example Hurricane Helene, and “background long duration climate global heating”, it is “clear that increased global heating provides more heat to the upper ocean waters”.
This is where circulating storms can pick up additional energy as the storm moves across the ocean, and so increases the storm energy to more frequent storms, with stronger winds and more damage, he explained.
FactCheck verdict
Experts have told FactCheck that climate change does increase the intensity and likelihood of storms – but it’s not as simple as saying that every individual natural disaster is “unequivocally” caused by climate change.
(Image credit: Bonnie Cash/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
