Record-setting storm spurred by super-warm ocean

{Updated] To your growing climate change file, go ahead and add this stunner with implications also for the Southern US next week. Winds now measured at 205 m.p.h.

Hurricane Patricia, October 22, 2015 at Category 5 intensity. (NOAA)

Over the past day, Hurricane Patricia has explosively intensified from a tropical storm to a monstrous category five hurricane with 160 mph winds. Patricia is forecast to make landfall on Mexico’s west central coast late Friday with destructive winds, torrents of rain, and a devastating storm surge. 

The rate of the storm’s intensification in day’s time is nothing short of historic. In the process, Patricia morphed from a loosely organized conglomeration of thunderstorms to the planet’s strongest and most wicked class of storm...

Record-setting hurricanes like Patricia are consistent with one major prediction that climate researchers have made for some time about the consequences of a warming world.