A warmer world creates bigger and more damaging hailstones, study says

[OKIsItJustMe]

https://apnews.com/article/hail-climate-change-damage-storms-warming-8573b10ae336f3705865466e5bc986ef

By SETH BORENSTEIN
Updated 11:00 AM EDT, May 27, 2026

WASHINGTON (AP) — A warmer world will likely make bigger and more damaging hail, a new study said.

Because climate change from the burning of fossil fuels should make more high-energy unstable air, which is conducive to hail forming, global storms pelting roofs, cars and the ground with hail bigger than a large marble will increase between 38% and 47% by the end of the century, depending on how much heat-trapping gas the world spews, a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature said. And storms that produce smaller hail will shrink by 4% to 8%, researchers found.

Hail generally doesn’t kill people, but it is expensive. It already costs the U.S. about $10 billion a year and around $80 billion globally, said study co-author John Allen, a meteorology professor at Central Michigan University.

Hail does more damage than tornadoes and generally costs “more than a couple hurricanes a year now,” Allen said in the morning from Guymon, Oklahoma, before he ventured out with scientists who drive into the heart of hail storms to figure out what makes them tick. “We’ve seen record hailstones in recent years. I find this extremely concerning because we’re not really building our environment to be resilient to hail. We don’t include this in our design standards, for example, for built homes in the U.S. or indeed internationally.”

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Zhang, S., Zhang, Q., Allen, J.T. et al. Rising global hail damage potential in a warming world. Nature 653, 1069–1077 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10543-2

[bucolic_frolic]

1. Damn! When I read it the first time I thought it said gallstones. /nt