Climate change intensified Typhoon Shanshan, says study

LONDON – Typhoon Shanshan, which

struck southern Japan this week with heavy rain and strong winds

, was likely intensified by climate change, according to a study from Imperial College London. 

Researchers with the university teased out the contribution of global warming to the event using a method known as “attribution” to model what the storm might have looked like on a planet without climate change, where temperatures were 1.3 deg C cooler.

They found that the typhoon’s maximum wind speeds have become 7.5 per cent more intense in a warmer world. 

Shanshan, which

made landfall on the morning of Aug 29

on the southern island of Kyushu, was called a “rare typhoon” by the Japanese weather agency.

But the study’s authors warned that such events may not be so unusual in the future, likely occurring nearly six times in a decade, as opposed to less than five in a pre-industrial world.

More intense and frequent storms in Kyushu, an auto and semiconductor manufacturing hub, might take a toll on the Japanese economy at large.

This week, Shanshan forced automakers such as Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor and chipmakers Renesas Electronics and Tokyo Electron to halt operations in the region for several days.

Shanshan is not the only storm that has become more intense due to climate change.

Rising global temperatures made events such as Typhoon Gaemi, which killed 48 people and affected millions in the Philippines in July, significantly more violent and likely to occur again, according to research group World Weather Attribution. BLOOMBERG