Hurricanes 'feed on warm water'

WASHINGTON - Hurricanes feed on warm water, and a study has found a link between warming ocean temperatures and human use of fossil fuels.

The study is a challenge to sceptics who blame the warmer seas on natural climate cycles.

"Our paper suggests that it's human-induced burning of fossil fuels that have altered the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that have led to this warming in regions where Atlantic and Pacific hurricanes form," said Californian climate scientist Benjamin Santer, one of those involved in the study.

Santer and his colleagues used computer models to figure out what the world would be like if the Industrial Revolution had never happened.

That let them compare today's Earth with what the computer models indicated it would have been like if humans had never burned fossil fuels.

Only a combination of human-made and natural climate influences could account for the rise in sea surface temperatures over the past century.

- REUTERS