Climate change intensified back-to-back Philippines storms: study

Manila: Human induced climate change fuelled a rare string of back to back typhoons that battered the Philippines this year and boosted the chances of...

Manila: Human-induced climate change fuelled a rare string of back-to-back typhoons that battered the Philippines this year and boosted the chances of powerful storms making landfall, a new study said on Thursday.

Five typhoons and a tropical storm hit the Philippines in a 23-day period across October and November, killing more than 170 people and causing at least $235 million in damage, according to local authorities.

About 20 big storms and typhoons hit the Southeast Asian nation or its surrounding waters each year, killing scores of people. However, it is rare for multiple major weather events to hit over such a short period.

To assess the role of climate change in the string of storms, scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) network used modelling to compare weather patterns in today's world against a hypothetical world without human-induced warming.

"Our results show that conditions conducive to the development of consecutive typhoons in this region have been enhanced by global warming," they said in a study published late Thursday.