More severe weather patterns are also taking their toll. Typhoons and hurricanes are not only appearing later in their seasons, but elevated ocean temperatures have increased their intensity, especially in the North Atlantic.

The power train behind our planet’s storm systems is the oceans, which provide energy both by direct heat transfer from their warm surface and by the evaporation of water. Tropical cyclogenesis takes place when the atmosphere takes on heat and moisture from warm surface waters (at least eighty degrees Fahrenheit to depths of about 150 feet). As latent heat in the form of water vapor is drawn up from the ocean, the thunderstorm’s cyclonic surface winds cause it to spiral counterclockwise (clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere). As the storm system strengthens and hurricane-force winds are achieved, inward-moving air turns upward and outward, creating an eye, a center of calm usually twenty to forty miles in diameter. The heat energy generated by the evaporation process is stored in the form of water vapor, which rises in a ring of towering cumulonimbus clouds surrounding the calm eye of the cyclone. The eye itself is composed of slowly sinking warm air while the eye wall is a strong upward flow of air created by a moderate to strong low-level convergence of air.

A medium-sized hurricane releases enough energy in a single day as the simultaneous explosion of four hundred twenty-megaton hydrogen bombs—or more than half the electric energy used by the United States population in an entire year. Hurricanes (cyclones forming in the Atlantic) are rated using the Saffir-Simpson Scale, which categorizes storms based upon their maximum sustained winds. A tropical storm officially graduates to a Category-1 hurricane when its winds are clocked at 74–95 mph. A Category-5 storms packs winds of 156-plus miles per hour.

By the late 1990s, the effects of global warming made themselves known through hotter summers and colder winters, intensifying weather systems across the globe. The initial effects on hurricanes were tempered with the arrival of an El Niño cycle, a circulation pattern where pools of warm surface water and air pressure in the tropical western Pacific roll back and forth across ten thousand miles of ocean. While El Niño brought increased rainfall across the southern United States, its high winds sheared off the northern edges of hurricanes, sparing the East Coast.

From the mid-1970s to 1998, El Niño dominated weather patterns across North America. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that the first real effects of global warming suddenly became alarming.