This year, 2017 hurricane season has seen record number of hurricanes.

Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, and Maria. Harvey was the largest rain storm to record hitting the continental United States. Irma was the largest hurricane to form in the Atlantic Ocean. Maria devastated Puerto Rico right after irma. All of these major storms raise the question: is this the new normal, and what has global warming caused this? Well all the facts point towards yes!

A United States federal government report published in 1999 said that the majority of new Houstons houses were being built in the floodplains. This lead to a very large problem when it came to floods. Floodplain are nature areas that are unique to the environment in dealing with floods. Floodplain will always flood but in recent years with rising ocean levels these floods have become more common and more severe.

Due to global warming the Polar Ice caps are rapidly melting and that has caused ocean levels to rise. Also all the heat that is trapped in our atmosphere is heating the ocean. 2017 is set to be the third warmest ocean waters on record. When water is heated water expands therefore storm surge increases. Storm surge is the result of wind blowing large amounts of water onto land.
Hurricanes are very powerful storms that feed on warm waters. Harvey and all the other storms this season had unprecedented strength. If the climate was cooling then these hurricanes would be once in a 100 year storms. Yet every day we are pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide that is warming our climate. As the climate warms even more over these next decades hurricanes will become more and more common. Most of the scientific community supports this claim.

These findings have been presented to the united nations council of environmental concerns and as a result the Paris Climate Accord was signed by the vast majority of nations. There are many scientist that believe global warming is not human caused, but they agree that the hurricanes benefits from warm weather. Therefore all evidence points toward global warming human cause for not, helping hurricanes to be bigger and stronger.