LONDON: Extreme weather events – from scorching heatwaves to unusually heavy downpours – have caused widespread upheaval across the globe this year, with thousands of people killed and millions more displaced.
In the last three months, monsoon rains unleashed disastrous flooding in Bangladesh, and brutal heatwaves seared parts of South Asia and Europe. Meanwhile, prolonged drought has left millions on the brink of famine in East Africa.
Much of this, scientists say, is what is expected from climate change.
On Tuesday (Jun 28), a team of climate scientists published a study in the journal Environmental Research: Climate. The researchers scrutinised the role climate change has played in individual weather events over the past two decades.
The findings confirm warnings of how global warming will change our world – and also make clear what information is missing.
For heatwaves and extreme rainfall, “we find we have a much better understanding of how the intensity of these events is changing due to climate change”, said study co-author Luke Harrington, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington.
Less understood, however, is how climate change influences wildfires and drought.
For their review paper, scientists drew upon hundreds of “attribution” studies, or research that aims to calculate how climate change affected an extreme event using computer simulations and weather observations.
There are also large data gaps in many low- and middle-income countries, making it harder to understand what is happening in those regions, said co-author Friederike Otto, one of the climatologists leading the international research collaboration World Weather Attribution (WWA).
HEATWAVES
With heatwaves, it is highly probable that climate change is making things worse.
“Pretty much all heatwaves across the world have been made more intense and more likely by climate change,” said study co-author Ben Clarke, an environmental scientist at the University of Oxford.
In general, a heatwave that previously had a one in 10 chance of occurring is now nearly three times as likely – and peaking at temperatures around 1 degree Celsius higher – than it would have been without climate change.
An April heatwave that saw the mercury climb above 50 degrees Celsius in India and Pakistan, for example, was made 30 times more likely by climate change, according to WWA.
Heatwaves across the Northern Hemisphere in June – from Europe to the United States – highlight “exactly what our review paper shows … the frequency of heatwaves has gone up so much”, Otto said.
For all the latest world News Click Here
