by the Climate Centre at COP 24 in Katowice New research published on Monday, as the second week of UN climate talks in Poland got underway, shows “clear ties between today’s extremes and human causes” in both the developed and developing world.
The report – Explaining Extreme Events in 2017 from a Climate Perspective – is the seventh in an annual series that began in 2011.
“These attribution studies are telling us that a warming Earth is continuing to send us new and more extreme weather events every year,” said BAMS Editor Jeff Rosenfeld.
‘In a decade the research has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges’ This is the second year that scientists have identified extreme weather they say could not have happened without warming.
“Scientific evidence supports increasing confidence that human activity is driving a variety of extreme events now,” he added.
“These are having large economic impacts across the United States and around the world.” ‘Local risks’ The extreme-weather events studied in the seven issues of the report to date do not represent a comprehensive analysis of all events during that span, BAMS said.
About 70 per cent of the 146 research findings published in the series identified a substantial link between an extreme event and climate change; 30 per cent did not.
Researchers are “often going after more local risks like heatwaves, fire danger, and floods on scales of a few days, for pinpoint areas of extreme impacts,” Rosenfeld added.
“In barely a decade, the research focus has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges.” Coastal waters The research on 2017 includes findings that very warm seas off the coast of Africa that “could not have occurred in a pre-industrial climate” doubled the probability of drought in East Africa, which left more than 6 million people in Somalia facing food shortages.
Climate change made heatwaves in the European Mediterranean region at least as hot as last year’s three times more likely than in 1950, it says, while the record-breaking 2017 heat in China, once rare, is now a one-in-five-year event due to climate change.