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Warmer world means fiercer hurricanes will blow our way

9 October 2004

HURRICANES will become more destructive if the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continue to climb, suggests the most comprehensive computer modelling of hurricanes so far.

Previous research has predicted similar trends, but these studies were limited because they usually depended on a single computer model of climate change. So Tom Knutson of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, and colleagues looked at nine different climate models predicting how the climate would warm up if CO2 levels doubled over the next 80 years. Then they modelled the effect of…

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