The Project

We are a group of students from the School of Communication of Sciences Po in Paris. As part of our Controversies class, a course organized in collaboration with Medialab, we have set out to map out the hurricanes and global warming controversy.

Our aim is to represent the controversy as clearly as possible. We want to map out all the actors, the issues, their definitions, the link between all these in order to give a comprehensive image of the discussion surrounding the possible link between global warming and the increase in intensity and frequency of hurricanes.

Hurricanes are defined as heat engines, tropical storms which intensity is strengthen by the sea surface temperature. The Atlantic region has known many intense hurricane seasons, the Gulf of Mexico being a natural basin for hurricanes to develop. The American soil has experienced many extreme events related to its regional climate. As these particular storms seem to depend on climate, scientists who recognize that the earth is undergoing a global warming also are interested in the impact it can have on such heat engines, and the risk of damage induced.

What is striking is that there seems to be a great interest in the analysis of intensity of hurricanes, whether from the scientific community or academic fields (such as political sciences, sociology, economics…).

One major recent event that shook the whole research community on environment was the Hurricane Season of 2005 in the United States, with the emblematic Hurricane Katrina:

Katrina was a category 5 hurricane on the Saffir Simpson scale, the strongest possible. The highest winds blew as fast as 280km/h and the minimal central pressure of the storm was measured at 902 megabars. It made 3 landfalls: in Florida, Mississipi and the deadliest in Louisiana, around the port of New Orleans. It made $108 billion in damages, cost $40-$66 billion in insured losses, destroyed about 300,000 homes and resulted in 26 million liters of leaking oil into the Atlantic Ocean. Its overall economic cost was a staggering $250 billion. Worst of all, 1,388 people lost their lives in hurricane Katrina.

It seemed therefore interesting to look closer at the way we qualify hurricanes of the word “intensity” and how scientists look at the attribution of climate change to hurricanes changing behaviors.

If you would like to learn more about the controversy surrounding the link between hurricanes and global warming, please click here.

To go back to our introduction, click here.