Damage from whopper hurricanes rising for many reasons

Here we go again.

America and the world are getting more frequent and bigger multibillion dollar tropical catastrophes like Hurricane Laura, which is menacing the U.S. Gulf Coast, because of a combination of increased coastal development, natural climate cycles, reductions in air pollution and man-made climate change, experts say.

The list of recent whoppers keeps growing: Harvey, Irma, Maria, Florence, Michael, Dorian. And hurricane experts have no doubt that Laura will be right there with them.

It's a mess at least partially of our own making, said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Institute at the University of South Carolina.

“We are seeing an increase of intensity of these phenomena because we as a society are fundamentally changing the Earth and at the same time we are moving to locations that are more hazardous," Cutter said Wednesday.

In the last three years, the United States has had seven hurricane disasters that each caused at least $1 billion in damage, totaling $335 billion. In all of the 1980s, there were six, and their damage totaled $38.2 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All those figures are adjusted for the cost of living.

The Atlantic is increasingly spawning more major hurricanes, according to an Associated Press analysis of NOAA hurricane data since 1950. That designation refers to storms with at least 111-mile-per-hour (179-kilometer-per-hour) winds that are the ones that do the most damage. The Atlantic now averages three major hurricanes a year, based on a 30-year running average. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was two.

The Atlantic’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy — a measurement that takes into account the number of storms, their strength and how long they last — is now 120 on a...