A study reveals that the climate problem has made extreme weather more frequent and severe.

Mon jan 09 2023 18.36 GMT

By Oliver Milman

 

Research demonstrating that catastrophic weather occurrences were made more likely by climate change is described by scientists as "quite frightening."

According to new research, the climate crisis has made some of the world's most severe weather events much more likely. These events include record heat in China, extreme rainfall in the UK, and California's unrelenting drought.

According to the examination of extreme occurrences that occurred in 2021 and 2022, many of these extremes were made worse by global warming and in some cases would have been nearly unthinkable given how severe they were if people hadn't changed the climate by burning fossil fuels.

According to Stephanie Herring, a climate scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "the severe magnitude of these occurrences is really worrying" (Noaa).

"We need to determine whether these incidents indicate that things are heating up more quickly than we had anticipated. We anticipate that the severity of high heat will increase, and further study will enable us to more accurately predict future change.

All around the world, the fingerprint of climate change is being found. Contrarily, the extreme rainfall that inundated parts of the UK in May 2021 was 1.5 times more likely as a result of global warming, while the risk of extreme drought that affected California and Nevada from October 2020 to September 2021 was made six times worse by the climate crisis and a strong periodic La Nia climate event.

Due to human-caused climate change, a severe heat wave in China in February 2021 was made between four and twenty times more likely, and the acute drought Iran suffered in 2021 is now 50% more likely due to the greenhouse gases humans has pumped into the sky.

A wide range of other severe effects can be partly or fully attributed to the climate crisis, such as the persistent cloud cover over the Tibetan plateau that inhibited vegetation growth and the weather that made a dangerous wildfire in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2021 90% more likely than it would have been otherwise. These effects are thought to be the result of increased global temperatures, abnormal winds, and localised pollution.

The compilation of studies, which Noaa presented at a meeting on Monday, gathers some of the most recent instances of climate attribution, in which researchers were able to identify the precise role that human-induced climate change had in certain weather occurrences and disasters.

The message has "developed over time as the evidence has expanded," according to Herring, into more precise attribution techniques. Previously, scientists were extremely reticent to discuss the effect of climate change upon individual occurrences, preferring a more broad probabilistic framework.

Scientists are now able to offer a more accurate and timely evaluation of the impact of the climate problem on specific catastrophes using ever-more-powerful climate models and historical evidence. One research revealed that the climate crisis increased the likelihood of heavy rain by roughly 80 times, which led to deadly floods in Nigeria, Niger, and Chad last year.

Herring issued a dire warning, claiming that many of the temperatures being seen are much beyond any recent historical averages and are driving mankind into a perilous new condition. For instance, a heatwave in South Korea in October 2021 was so extreme that it would be thought to occur once every 6,250 years, with temperatures about 7F higher than average. However, if planet-heating emissions are not drastically reduced, the climate models indicate that by 2060, this will become the new normal for South Korea.

The Pacific Northwest of the US, whose temperatures are typically mild, may very probably suffer the same fate as 2021, when a scorching heatwave claimed 600 lives. A later analysis discovered that the heatwave was 43 times more likely due to the climate problem.

The Earth system is being severely disrupted by human-caused climate change, according to Paul Higgins, associate executive director of the American Meteorological Society.

As this latest study serves to demonstrate, we should anticipate it to result in more severe incidents. Despite this risk, we must do everything we can to ensure that people and all other forms of life prosper.