If you've lived on Earth in the last few years, you've probably experienced some crazy weather. Maybe it was a heat wave that lasted for a long time. There was a storm that dumped a lot of rain. A powerful storm appeared overnight.
The story is about climate change. As the Earth gets hotter, there is a chance of extreme weather. It can feel impersonal to say that climate change has affected me.
People want to know if climate change caused the floods in their home. Michael Wehner is a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies how climate change affects extreme weather. Those are great questions.
Scientists are able to answer those questions with more certainty. Climate change has made it possible to say how bad the weather was. The disaster wouldn't have happened if global warming hadn't happened.
Every heat wave gets worse as a result of climate change.
Global warming is connected to heat waves. As the global climate warms, heat waves would also warm.
Exactly how warm is it?
Scientists are able to quantify that. Climate change has increased the temperature of heat waves in the US by up to 5 degrees.
When heat records fall over and over, you can see those extra degrees of heat. More than a dozen cities in the Western U.S. and Texas experienced record-breaking temperatures during a heat wave this June. New heat records are set almost every summer in many cities.
Scientists can use advanced statistics and supercomputing to analyze the most extreme heat waves, like the one that killed hundreds of people in Canada and the Pacific Northwest in 2011. In parts of Canada the temperature reached 120 degrees.
Scientists analyzed how climate change affected the heat wave. It was not possible without climate change.
There is another way to say that. The extreme heat wave was caused by climate change.
Statistics are used by most scientists. There are positives and negatives to that.
Climate scientists don't use the word cause. They prefer to use numbers that show how likely an extreme weather event was compared to a world before humans started burning fossil fuels.
Many scientists are aware that the numbers may not mean a lot to the public.
The heat wave in the Pacific Northwest was a one in 1000 year event. A senior research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand says that it was about 150 times more likely today than it was in a preindustrial climate. The heat wave wasn't going to happen in a preindustrial world.
For more common types of dangerous weather, more detailed numbers can be helpful.
Imagine if there was a storm that dropped more rain than usual and flooded your house. It would have been very rare in the past.
Climate change could cause that storm to be 10 times more likely to occur.
It will happen once every 7 years if that event is 10 times more likely. Weather that used to be very rare is now happening frequently. People can plan for the future if they know that.
Climate change information could be included in regular weather forecasts.
This is possible because of new research methods. Science doesn't move very fast in general. Because of the enormous demand for information about how global warming is changing our lives, the science of finding climate fingerprints in weather disasters has gone from infancy to maturity in less than two decades.
The public has a clear demand for this. The research techniques have advanced so much that people with less academic training can do the work. He says that you could hire professionals to do this.
The European Union is piloting a service that will analyze how climate change contributed to individual weather events.
Climate scientists would have more time to focus on the most pressing questions about global warming.
It's hard for scientists to study some weather.
Even if the connection to climate change is well- understood, it's still difficult for scientists to figure out how climate change affects individual events.
And finally, naturally this #heatwave too is strengthened by climate change.
— Mika Rantanen (@mikarantane) June 13, 2022
Increasing frequency, duration and intensity of heatwaves with global warming is perhaps the most established fact in the attribution science. pic.twitter.com/V27Hmn9Hog
As the Earth gets hotter, there are more fires. Hot and dry weather is more likely because of global warming.
Scientists don't know how much worse a particular wildfire was because of global warming.
Humans can be involved in where fires start and how large they get. A campfire, power line, or even a rogue cigarette can be used to start a fire. The amount of vegetation that can be used to feed the fire is dictated by human land management. The size of the fire and its location are influenced by firefighters.
"Any fire has so many factors going on, and only some of them are related to the climate," says Megan, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada.
It's hard to attribute hurricanes to climate change. Hurricanes are complex and rare compared to other types of extreme weather, since only a small portion of the storms that form actually make it to land.
It's hard to compare the effects of storms that happen today with storms that happened before humans caused global warming.
Scientists can quantify the effects of climate change on hurricanes. Climate change increased the amount of rain that fell during Hurricane Harvey. Climate change increased the amount of rain in the 2020 Hurricane season by 10%, according to a study.
Climate change and other changes in hurricanes are still being studied by researchers.
Hurricanes are getting stronger and storms are more likely to intensify. Warmer ocean water is generally to blame for both phenomena, but scientists don't understand what's happening well enough to say that a storm was more powerful because of climate change
We can't say that this is the reason for their rapid growth. She says that the problem has not been solved. We are still working on that.
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