Reference no: EM132530822

For this argument decide if it is a correlation (it proves one thing causes the other) Give your reasons and explain your answer.

While studying how tropical storms interact with ocean currents, Kerry Emmanuel at MIT found that the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes was strongly correlated with the surface temperature of the water over which they formed. More generally, hurricanes in the Atlantic and the western North Pacific had been signifi- cantly more powerful in the 1980s and 1990s than in the '60s and '70s. This correlates with warmer ocean temperatures in those areas. Emmanuel explains that warmer water causes stronger storms because storms absorb their energy directly from the ocean be- neath them. Since warmer water contains more energy than cooler water, warmer surface waters supply more energy to the storm, leading to stronger hurricanes. Thus, Emmanuel concludes, warm- ing ocean temperatures are making hurricanes more powerful.