It just got harder to deny climate change drives extreme weather
30 March 2017
It just got harder to deny climate change drives extreme weather
The link between human activity and unusual jet stream patterns associated with extreme weather events is getting stronger
By Olive Heffernan
In convincing the public of the dangers of climate change, nothing would be more powerful than being able to link extreme weather events with our unbridled love for fossil fuels.
But that’s hard, even though we know that the likelihood of dangerous cold snaps, floods and droughts increases the more greenhouse gases we emit.
The best evidence for this includes sophisticated climate models used to analyse the odds of such events with and without human-induced climate change. They show that warming increased the likelihood of a heatwave of the sort that hit Europe in 2003 – claiming an estimated 35,000 lives – by 40 per cent. Likewise, it makes droughts like that in California in recent years twice as likely.
However, saying human activity is implicated in any one event is notoriously difficult, in part because the Earth’s climate varies naturally, a fact long seized upon by climate sceptics.
More:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2126391-it-just-got-harder-to-deny-climate-change-drives-extreme-weather/?utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=ILC&utm_campaign=webpush&cmpid=ILC%257CNSNS%257C2016-GLOBAL-webpush-EXTREMEWEATHER
