As Beryl churns thru the Caribbean, shattering records and demonstrating the remorseless physics of warmer oceans, I turned back to this collection of interviews I did some years ago, on expectations for stronger storms in a warming climate.
The Fossil record shows that under conditions not that much warmer than today, storms that were truly “a different animal” were common in the Caribbean.
James Hansen talked about evidence that storms strong enough, under the right seafloor conditions, at some locations, to toss 1000 ton megaboulders onto shore.
Blair Tormey shared with me some of his research showing how specific locations created conditions to magnify wave forces to monstrous levels.
10 years ago, I first interviewed Jeffrey Kiehl, a Paleo Climatologist who was studying ocean sediments around Greenland.
He was looking at remnants of a world much warmer than the one we live in today (one the fossil fuel industry is bent on taking us to).
He told me that under those conditions, storms much more powerful than Beryl were making their way as far north as Greenland, so powerful that, today, 40-50 million years later, their traces can still be detected.
Dr Kiehl has since earned a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology, so as to better be able to help people cope with their trauma, when they realize the implications of climate change.
I remember a “brown-bag” lunchtime talk at the UT geology department that described sediment signatures (anomalous sand layers) well inland from the Gulf Coast that showed just how far a major storm surge could go.
Hansen didn’t just talk about it, as a matter of urgency before the COP in 2016, he released a paper before it had been peer-reviewed as a warning of what was coming because he knew it was so critically important
Ignored again as usual as an alarmist. https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04710s.html