Pouring it on: Climate change made 2020 hurricanes rainier

By SETH BORENSTEIN
AP Science Writer

Human-caused climate change made the record-smashing 2020 Atlantic hurricane season even wetter. A new study on the record busy hurricane year found it was 5% rainier than it would have been had their been no global warming from the burning of fossil fuels. There were a record 30 named storms in 2020 and 11 of them — also a record — made landfall in the United States. The first study to look for a climate change fingerprint on an entire hurricane season found that the storms that reached hurricane status were 8% wetter. Scientists compared the reality to a computer simulated world without climate change.