Tropical Storm Henri is expected to intensify into a hurricane and is currently tracking towards the Cape and Islands. However, whether it is caused by global warming remains a question. 

“It’s inevitable we are going to get hit by a major hurricane in New England. I can’t say when, but from our history, you just have to expect it,” Robert Thompson, a former National Weather Service meteorologist who retired in 2018 after 45 years, told Cape Cod Times. 

This comes after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres addressed a report by the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change and called it a “code red for humanity” two weeks ago. It remains to be discovered whether global warming affects hurricanes in the Atlantic.

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“One of the issues with the Atlantic basin is that there is strong multi-decadal variability. That makes it hard to determine trends that may be caused by increasing greenhouse gases,” said Thomas Knutson, a senior scientist at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J.

The multi-decadal variability brought upon by either natural cycles in the ocean or changes in human-caused aerosols (particulates and gases emitted from cars, manufacturing, power plants and other human activities) over the Atlantic has the potential to mask greenhouse gas-related trends caused by man. This serves as a problem in finding out the fingerprint of greenhouse warming on Atlantic hurricanes. 

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Hurricanes are driven by warm water temperatures. While scientists agree that ocean temperatures are rising and that global warming caused by human activities plays a role in that, large oceanic variations in climate play a major role in controlling and regulating hurricane activity. 

“It’s hard for us to say what part of observed Atlantic hurricane changes is human-caused. There are a lot of open questions still, that become more pointed at regional scales,” Knutson said. “The whole climate system is very complex, (and) you have to be careful reading it,” he added.