Natural disasters increasingly linked to climate change, new report warns

 https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-natural-disasters-link-increase-global-warming-report-warning-a8103556.html

 

Climate change is increasing the risk of extreme weather events, including droughts, flooding and heatwaves, according to a new report.
Researchers from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, a non profit organisation that supports debate on climate change and energy issues, analysed 59 studies which looked at climate change and extreme weather.

All had been published since the Paris climate summit two years ago.

The harm inflicted by these events was estimated at around $8bn (£5.9bn) in economic damage and resulted in at least 4,000 deaths.

“Just a few years ago it was hard to say more about any storm, drought or heatwave than it was ‘consistent with what science predicts’,” said the report’s author, Richard Black, a director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
As climate science has advanced, scientists have become increasingly able to not just make future predictions of climate change’s impact, but also look for its effects in current weather events, he added.

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“This is a real world analysis of what is actually happening, rather than a projection of what might happen in the future,” he said. "This report shows that increasingly, [scientists are] finding that specific events are made more likely or more damaging by climate change."
The effects were most obvious for heatwaves, as the connection between increased general temperatures and increased temperatures during a hot spell are relatively straightforward.
Storms and hurricanes are more complicated. Although such events are strongly linked to climate change, they are complex phenomena with many contributing factors, making the links more ambiguous.