Taiwan fears increased typhoon danger with global warming

By Staff Writers
Taipei (AFP) March 1, 2010 Global warming is raising the danger from typhoons, Taiwan experts warned Monday, saying the island may be hit in a year or two by a powerful storm like the one which killed more than 700 last August. Typhoon Morakot dumped a record 3,000 millimetres (120 inches) of rainfall and caused massive mudslides in the south of the island, and the government should be prepared for similar disasters in the future, they said. “A typhoon as powerful as Morakot is very likely to strike Taiwan in a year or two,” said Wang Chung-ho, a research fellow at the Institute of the Earth Sciences at Taiwan’s top academic body Academia Sinica. “The government must work out effective countermeasures,” he told AFP. … Wang said there was a clear long-term trend for increasing precipitation over Taiwan during the monsoon season. The average monthly rainfall of the six-month period beginning in May has topped 400 millimetres during the past six years, compared with an average of 380 millimetres in the years before 2004. “It’s pretty remarkable to see this kind of humidity in the atmosphere over such a sustained time period,” Wang said. “This indicates the environment has changed, and that change probably resulted from global warming.” …