The speed at which Otis developed into a catastrophic hurricane has left many scientists debating whether climate change could be to blame.
Most scientists attributed the unusual strength of Hurricane Otis to El Niño, the weather phenomenon associated with changes in the atmosphere and the fluctuation of water temperature in the Pacific. But in an opinion piece for Bloomberg, climate change expert Mark Gongloff noted that while Mexico’s “first Category 5 storm in history hitting a city of almost 700,000 people sounds scary enough … the truly unnerving thing about Otis is that it was merely a tropical storm less than a day before making landfall.” Gongloff noted that while climate change “isn’t necessarily making hurricanes more frequent … it is making them much more likely to develop into Otis-like monsters overnight.”