Climate Change Intensified Typhoon Shanshan, Study Says

Typhoon Shanshan, which struck southern Japan last week with heavy rain and strong winds, was likely intensified by climate change, according to a study from Imperial College London.

Researchers with the university teased out the contribution of global warming to the event using a method known as ‘attribution’ to model what the storm might have looked like on a planet without climate change, in which temperatures are 1.3C cooler. They found that the typhoon’s maximum wind speeds have become 7.5% more intense in a warmer world.

Shanshan, which made landfall on Thursday morning on the southern island of Kyushu, was called a “rare typhoon” by the Japanese weather agency. But the study’s authors warned that such events may not be so unusual in future, likely occurring nearly six times in a decade, as opposed to less than five in a pre-industrial world.

More intense and frequent storms in Kyushu, an auto and semiconductor manufacturing hub, might take a toll on the Japanese economy at large. This week, Shanshan forced automakers like Toyota Motor Corp. and Nissan Motor Co., and chipmakers Renesas Electronics Corp. and Tokyo Electron Ltd. to halt operations in the region for several days.

Shanshan is not the only storm that’s become more intense due to climate change. Last month, rising global temperatures made events like Typhoon Gaemi, which killed 48 people and affected millions in the Philippines, significantly more violent and likely to occur again, according to the research group World Weather Attribution.