By Ethan Weston , Caitlin Baldwin
Hurricane Harvey was the most intense hurricane to make landfall on the U.S. mainland in over a decade.
And because of climate change, hurricanes like Harvey are probably going to become more common.
It’s hard to pin a single weather event — like Harvey — on climate change. But predictive models show it could make future hurricanes stronger.
One 2010 study says by the end of the century, the U.S. should expect a 30 percent increase in potential damage from hurricanes in just the Atlantic.
According to the study, two things in particular are likely to get a lot worse in future hurricanes: storm surge and rainfall.
Rising sea levels caused by global warming make coastal areas more likely to flood when a storm begins pushing water inland, a process known as storm surge.
