The summer of 2018 has not been a normal summer. Throughout June and July an extended heatwave set record-breaking high temperatures across the northern hemisphere. In Japan, more than 22,000 people were taken to hospital with heat stroke as the country recorded its highest-ever temperature of 41.1 degrees Celsius. In California, Portugal and as far north as the Arctic Circle huge wildfires, encouraged by months of unusually dry conditions, followed the searing heat.
Up until a few years ago, it wasn’t possible to draw that link with any degree of accuracy, Otto says. But in 2004, Pete Stott at the UK Met Office published a paper in the scientific journal Nature showing that climate change had at least doubled the risk of the 2003 European heatwave that killed tens of thousands of people. Twelve years later the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society dedicated an entire issue to the new field of extreme event attribution. In the introduction, its editors argued that it was now possible to detect the effects of climate change on some events with high confidence. “That was really the first time we could say that we can attribute events to anthropogenic climate change,” Otto says.
“For a large part of the world it’s still a very new science,” she says. But this emerging field could help governments to start making their decisions on what might happen on the future instead of thinking about what has happened in the past. “If you have a changing climate and you only look at the past you will not get the right answer,” Otto says. At the moment the WWA’s analyses compare a world with no warming to a world with one degree of warming, but Otto also runs models that look at how the weather will change if the world warms by a further one degree, as is projected to happen by the end of this century. If that happens, the temperatures in Copenhagen we saw this summer will be four times more likely to happen in the future.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/climate-change-weather-attribution
No comments:
Post a Comment