Nov 11, 2013 2 min read

On Monday, we received a note from a reader who remarked, with no small amount of sarcasm, that in an Associated Press story on the typhoon that devastated the Philippines “not once was the storm attributed to man-made global warming or natural gas drilling.”

While natural gas drilling has been linked by some geologists to earthquakes, there’s no direct link between a well pad in Cecil Township and a typhoon 8,000 miles away. But the role of climate change in making the typhoon, dubbed Haiyan, so deadly should not be readily dismissed.

Just as there is an overwhelming consensus among scientists that global warming is real and that the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere contributes to it, there is also close to unanimous agreement among scientists that climate change will make storms that churn through the Atlantic and end up on our shores in hurricane form, that much more ferocious and lethal.

As Will Steffen, a professor at Australian National University, told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper Monday, “Once (cyclones) do form, they get most of their energy from the surface waters of the ocean. We know sea-surface temperatures are warming pretty much around the planet, so that’s a pretty direct influence of climate change on the nature of the storm.”

Remember the havoc unleashed in this region when the remnants of Hurricane Ivan came sweeping up in September 2004? Imagine if we’d gotten a couple more inches of rain on top of the 6 inches that fell. What happened in the Philippines should not just evoke our pity, but should also serve as a wake-up call.