Introduction

Abstract

As I write this book Super Typhoon Haiyan, thought to be the strongest storm ever recorded, has devastated large areas of the Philippines and is thought to have killed over 10,000 people. Yet the science linking tropical storms and climate change is unclear. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released in September 2013, found that: Globally, there is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence. This is due to insufficient observational evidence, lack of physical understanding of the links between anthropogenic drivers of climate and tropical cyclone activity, and the low level of agreement between studies as to the relative importance of internal variability, and anthropogenic and natural forcings.(IPCC, 2013, original emphasis)