Typhoons that slam into land in the northwestern Pacific — especially the biggest tropical cyclones of the bunch — have grown considerably stronger since the 1970s, a new study said on Monday.
Overall, the intensities of typhoons that make landfall have increased by about 12 percent in nearly four decades.
The change is most noticeable for storms with winds of 209kph or more — those in categories 4 and 5.
Since 1977, they have gone from a once-a-year occurrence to four times a year, according to a study in the journal Nature Geoscience.
LIONROCK, HAIYAN
These are storms like Lionrock that last month killed at least 17 people, about half of them elderly residents of a Japanese nursing home, and Haiyan — one of the strongest storms on record — which killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines in 2013.
Study lead author Wei Mei, a climate scientist at the University of North Carolina, connected the strengthening of these storms to data showing warmer seawater near coasts, which would provide more fuel for typhoons.
NORTHERN EXPOSURE
As the world warms up more, stronger storms are likely to get even more intense, especially north of 20 degrees north latitude, where Taiwan, eastern China, South Korea and Japan are, Mei said.
Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach said the study makes sense and raises interesting questions, but added that some of the storms before 1987 might have had their wind speeds underestimated.
BETTER RECORDS?
Mei said he thinks that time period actually had better measurements, because planes were then flying into storms to gauge their strength.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema