NBC ‘Chief Environmental Affairs’ Reporter: Global Warming Like ‘Steroids’ for Storms

RUSH EXCERPT:

MELBER: "With me now is Ann Thompson, the chief environmental affairs correspondent. Thank you for being here. Are these severe weather events increasing in frequency?"
THOMPSON: "It certainly seems like it but I can tell you when you go to the national centers for environmental information, they say in the first six months of 2017, we saw nine climate or weather events, extreme events, that caused more than $1 billion more in destruction. Nine events. That is on track to challenge the record years of 2011 and 2016. Now on average from 1980 to today, there are usually $5.5 billion weather events. We saw nine in the first half of this year. And that didn't include Harvey and Irma. And when you think about Harvey and Irma, they are the first two category four hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S. In the 166 years of record keeping. So we're in some uncharted territory."
MELBER: "When people talk about once in a century. What do we know that the data? Not that they're caused by climate change but are they more extreme because of it?"
THOMPSON: "That's the question. What role does climate change play when we see incredible storms? Talking to scientists, they say climate change is like loading the dice. It makes it possible for these storms to have a greater impact. Another way to think about it. Think of it like steroids in baseball. The role of steroids with a home run hitter. It doesn't make it easier, it doesn't improve his hand-eye contact. It improves his strength to hit the ball farther to go over the fence more often. And that's essentially with a greenhouse gases do in weather events. It makes it more likely that these events will be extreme."
MELBER: "So climate change is juicing the hurricane."
THOMPSON: "Take hurricanes, for example. Hurricanes feed off warm water. In the part of Atlantic where hurricanes form, there year, sea surface temperatures have been anywhere from one to two degrees warmer this summer. Now you've got more warm water to feed hurricanes. More warm water over warm air that can contain more moisture. When you have warm water plus warm air, it creates a hurricane, hits he landfall. Then it has the ability to produce more rainfall as we saw in Hurricane Harvey."