Ralf Toumi, Professor and Co-Director at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change from Imperial College London spoke to CGTN Europe about Cyclone Chido.
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00:00Scientists say rising temperatures are making extreme weather events like cyclones more frequent and more severe.
00:07Ralph Toomey is co-director at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.
00:12Thanks for coming on the programme. If we can start off, can you talk us through this?
00:16What is a cyclone? Explain this kind of extreme weather event.
00:22So a tropical cyclone is a low pressure system which is really driven by the ocean heat.
00:29So that creates a huge amount of thunderstorms that start rotating in a very organised way
00:36and that creates some extremely strong wind speeds with a huge amount of rain.
00:41And they are known to cause a lot of devastation throughout the tropics.
00:46And this is the season in the South Indian Ocean.
00:49I mean this overseas department is the poorest region of France.
00:53Is the devastation that we are seeing due to a lack of resilience of communities like Mayotte
00:58or are the ravages of climate change making very intense tropical cyclones like Tudor more likely to happen?
01:05Well I don't think it's an either or, it's both.
01:09So we are just doing some calculations on this tropical cyclone
01:16and we think cyclones like that are maybe 30% or 40% more likely.
01:21So that's the climate change bit.
01:23So no doubt about the fact that climate change, the warmer oceans basically make a storm
01:29that would have been maybe a Category 3, now a Category 4.
01:34Now in terms of the impact though, the devastation, that is really to do with resilience.
01:39So if you are very strongly adapted, so there are some countries that come to mind like Hong Kong or Taiwan
01:47which are very affluent, they would not see this level of devastation.
01:51So there is no doubt that the devastation is related to development and infrastructure.
01:57But there is still a climate change signal in the wind speed.
02:00So they are just two different things which just happen to converge here.
02:03The 2024 hurricane season marks the 9th consecutive year of above average storm activity in the Atlantic Basin.
02:10It is an alarming trend, isn't it?
02:13Yeah, the Atlantic is a different basin there, different things going on.
02:19But you can look all over the world, tropical cyclones have been shown in the long term to become more intense.
02:27The total number might not change but actually when they do happen they tend to be much stronger
02:32and we find that happening everywhere.
02:35So what next then? In terms of rescue efforts, they are continuing, some aid has reached the islands.
02:42But in events like this, what can be done to mitigate the impact?
02:49Well, I think clearly there is the short term, so there is disaster relief and helping people as much as they can.
02:56It is obviously a responsibility of France to ensure that as citizens.
03:00So longer term, I am sure they will have a hard look at their planning.
03:05I think this was well forecasted as an event but I think there maybe was a lack of sheltering available for the population.
03:12It sounds like the housing state isn't what it should be.
03:16So I think it is really about the infrastructure that needs to be made more resilient.
03:20So when they rebuild, we have this term called rebuild better, so I hope they do that.
03:25Ralph Toomey at Imperial College London, thank you very much.