New York — How powerful would Hurricane Harvey have been in 1880? How much stronger might it be in 2100? A single Hurricane Harvey has been more than anyone can bear, but to better prepare cities for future storms, researchers are preparing to re-watch Harvey thousands of times. They’ve already been studying earlier storms, and their conclusions don’t bode well for the decades to come. In the months and years after Super-storm Sandy’s 2012 assault on New Jersey and New York, Gary Lackmann, an atmospheric science professor at North Carolina State University, was asked how the event might be understood in light of human-driven global warming. He knew that the question everyone wants answered — did climate change cause the storm — wasn’t the right one. Hurricanes were around long before the industrial revolution. Two questions did, however, resonate. The first is the more difficult one, though research has shown that the future will likely see more intense storms, even if there may be ...
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