Climate change role clear in many extreme events but social factors also key, study finds

Climate change is to blame for the majority of the heatwaves being recorded around the planet but the relation to other extreme events is less clear according to a study.

Friederike Otto, a climate change and environment expert, said that climate change is often assumed to be a factor in extreme events.

Climate change can have a role in the costs of extreme weather events to our societies.

Otto and his team used observational science to calculate how human-caused climate change is affecting the impact in a study published in the journal IOP Publishing.

They say that the role of climate change is clear and that the average and extreme heat levels across the globe are increasing because of human-caused climate change.

A heatwave with a one in 50 chance of happening in pre-industrial times is now almost five times more likely to happen. There have been over 157,000 deaths from 34 heatwaves in the past two decades. The impact of climate change on heatwaves is often underestimated.

Otto said that no one drops dead on the street during a heatwave or at least very few do.

Otto said that most people died from pre-existing conditions becoming acute. One of the big climate impacts that wasn't talked about enough was the fires.

There is a link between climate change and other events. There are some areas of the world where the climate is getting worse because of human-caused climate change, such as southern Africa, while there are other areas where the climate is not changing very much.

Otto said that by focusing too much on climate change, it really takes the responsibility, but also the agency, away to address these local drivers of disasters.

Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels, that will not go away. The overestimation of climate change is not helpful for dealing with and improving resilience to these threats.

Otto said that the lack of reliable data around the globe made it difficult to figure out how much climate change was to blame for extreme weather.

Lower- and middle-income countries are more likely to be at risk of the consequences of climate change because there isn't enough information coming from them.

A professor of environmental economics at the University of California, Davis was not involved in the study.

The consequences of climate change are not limited to extremes. Mortality, agriculture, worker productivity and safety can be adversely affected by changes in average conditions. A large fraction of climate change impacts may be the aggregate consequences of these changing conditions.

Otto wanted a definition of what was considered to be risk in climate change modelling. The effects that extreme weather has on individuals, labour productivity, infrastructure, agricultural systems and property should be considered.

Otto said that they started at "no one was ever talking about climate change" and have moved over to "blaming a lot of things on climate change". We need to realise that reality is messy in the middle and that we need to disentangle these drivers in order to really address climate change properly.