From late October to November this year, six consecutive tropical cyclones battered the Philippines, affecting 30 million people. Data analyses from two separate organizations now show they were intensified by human-induced climate change.
International scientific collective World Weather Attribution (WWA) released a study on Dec. 12 showing that climate change has made conditions conducive to the formation of typhoons twice as likely. It also found the likelihood of stronger typhoons, those in categories 3-5 (on a scale of 1-5), hitting the Philippines increased by 25% this year due to climate change.
“This later part of the 2024 [Philippine] typhoon season was extraordinary,” study co-author Clair Barnes, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said at an online press briefing. “There were five typhoons and a tropical storm that affected the country within just 30 days. At one point in November, there were four typhoons active simultaneously in the Pacific Basin, which is the first time this has happened since records began in the ’50s.”
Barnes said only three storms normally form in the Pacific Basin in November.
Co-author Ben Clarke, from Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy, said the team used observations of past cyclones and climate models. “So from these two analyses, we find that the conditions in which the storms developed in 2024 have become about 70% more likely due to warming of 1.3° [Celsius, or 2.3° Fahrenheit],” he said.
“The chance of multiple major typhoons making landfall will continue to increase as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels,” the report said.
Climate Central, an organization of scientists and communicators, also released an analysis last month about how climate change-driven ocean warming has intensified typhoon activity in the Western Pacific Ocean, as observed using their Climate Shift Index: Ocean tool.
Climate scientist Daniel Gilford told Mongabay in an email that higher sea surface temperatures fuel typhoons to reach higher wind speeds.
“The Climate Shift Index: Ocean scores show that the water temperatures encountered by Typhoons Yinxing, Toraji, Usagi, and Man-Yi [in November] were made up to 40 times more likely by climate change,” he said, adding that for October, climate change made unusual warmth up to 100 times more likely. This resulted in “higher-than-normal” water temperatures that fueled typhoons that month.
Besides these four storms, two others struck the Philippines in October: Severe Tropical Storm Trami, which left at least 151 people dead, and Super Typhoon Kong-Rey, which also wreaked havoc in Taiwan.
Afrhill Rances, communications head of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ Asia-Pacific office, said at the WWA briefing that in addition to ramping up anticipatory disaster risk management, climate financing must also be strengthened “to address systemic vulnerabilities, enhance resilience and ensure that communities can recover and adapt in the face of foreseeing climate impact.”
Banner image of four storms over the Western Pacific Ocean in November 2024, by NASA Earth Observatory via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
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