MIT Professor Kerry Emanuel recently wrote a column on FiveThirtyEight, the blog founded by statistician and writer Nate Silver. As an expert on hurricanes and climate change, Emanuel was asked to respond to a post about the cost of natural disasters by Roger Pielke Jr. on the same website. In his post, Emanuel states the following:
I’m not comfortable with Pielke’s assertion that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages from natural hazards; I don’t see how the data he cites support such a confident assertion.
He goes on to say:
One would be foolish to make plans that have to deal with U.S. hurricane risk without accounting for the evidence that the underlying risk is increasing, whether or not actuarial trends have yet emerged at the 95 percent confidence level.
You can learn more about the science of climate change from Prof. Emanuel and others on OCW and MITx/edX:
- 12.340 Global Warming Science (OCW)
- 12.340 Global Warming Science (MITx/edX)
