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This is Scientific American 60-second Science, I'm Adam Levy¹.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是亚当·利维。

On September 20th, 2017, a huge storm, Hurricane Maria, made landfall on Puerto Rico. While the initial estimates suggested around 60 people lost their lives as a result of this horrific hurricane, the official figure was later raised to the thousands.

2017年9月20日，巨型风暴飓风“玛利亚”登陆波多黎各。虽然最初估计显示这场可怕的飓风造成约60人丧生，但之后公布的官方数字却上升至数千人。

"We've all seen it on the news, right, we all watched or heard about how people didn't have power for a month after, three months, six months, a year after—apparently there are still some people on the island who still don't have power."

“我们都在新闻中看到了这场飓风，我们都目睹或听说过，人们在灾后一个月、三个月、六个月甚至一年后仍然没有电力供应——显然现在岛上仍有一些居民无电可用。”

David Keellings, a geographer² at the University of Alabama. With a cost to America of $90 billion, Hurricane Maria was the third most financially destructive in U.S. history. But just how unusual was its intensity³? Keellings set out to compare Maria to all the other storms that have hit Puerto Rico since records began in 1956.

阿拉巴马大学的地理学家大卫·基林斯说到。飓风“玛利亚”给美国造成了900亿美元的损失，是美国史上经济损失第三高的飓风。那这场飓风的强度有多不同寻常呢？基林斯开始将飓风“玛利亚”与自1956年有记录以来侵袭波多黎各的所有其他风暴进行比较。

"Maria is more intense than any one of those other 128 storms that we have on the record. It's dropped more rainfall than any one of those storms and to a significant amount—about 30 to 60 percent more rainfall than any other storm in history in Puerto Rico."

“‘玛利亚’比我们记录的其他128场风暴中任何一场都要强。其降雨量比任何一场风暴都要多，而且降雨量相当可观——比波多黎各史上其他任何风暴的降雨量都要多30%到60%左右。”

So the question is, could climate change have played a role in this devastating⁴ record rainfall? While it's not possible to say a single storm is caused by climate change, it is possible to investigate whether climate change made a storm more likely—and this is exactly what Keellings investigated. He calculated how likely Maria was to take place in today's climate and in a world where we hadn't altered the global climate as much.

因此问题是，气候变化是否能影响这次毁灭性且创下纪录的降雨？虽然不可能说一场风暴是由气候变化引起的，但可以调查气候变化是否会使一场风暴更有可能发生——这正是基林斯的调查内容。他计算了飓风“玛利亚”在如今气候条件下发生的可能性，以及在我们未对全球气候做出如此大改变的世界里发生的可能性。

"So we dialed back global temperatures to the '50s, we dialed back CO2 to the '50s, we dialed back cloud cover to the 1950s, and then we calculate the probability of Maria again. And then we compare those two probability estimates. And when we do that, we find that Maria and Maria's precipitation in particular is about five times more likely now in the climate of today versus⁵ the climate of the 1950s. And that five times increase in likelihood is directly attributable to long-term climate change."

“所以我们把全球气温、二氧化碳和云量都调回到50年代，之后再次计算‘玛利亚'发生的概率。然后我们比较这两个概率估计。当我们进行比较时，我们发现飓风‘玛利亚'及其带来的降雨量，在如今气候下发生的概率是50年代气候下的五倍。这种可能性的五倍增长直接归因于长期气候变化。”

More and more research is finding links between extreme weather events and climate change, demonstrating that we're already feeling the impacts of global warming today.

越来越多的研究正在寻找极端天气事件与气候变化之间的联系，这表明我们今天已经感受到了全球变暖的影响。

But Keellings points out that we shouldn't be surprised to find climate change's fingerprints⁶ on storms like Maria. After all, for decades researchers have predicted that by changing the climate we would make hurricanes more intense.

但基林斯指出，我们不应对在“玛利亚”这样的风暴中发现气候变化的痕迹感到惊讶。毕竟，几十年来研究人员已经预测到，通过改变气候，我们将使飓风更加猛烈。

"This is something that we've known for a long time. But to now be actually able to say through these attribution-type studies that, hey, this is what we expect theoretically, and guess what, this is what the observations are showing us—that's I think something that's really powerful."

“这是我们早就知道的事情。但现在我们能通过这些归因类型的研究说，嘿，这就是我们在理论上所期望的，猜猜怎么着？这就是观察结果向我们展示的——我认为这是非常强大的东西。”

Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Adam Levy.

谢谢大家收听科学美国人——60秒科学。我是亚当·利维。