Climate change: Pakistan floods 'likely' made worse by warming

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The floods that hit Pakistan are thought to have been caused by global warming.

Climate change may have increased the intensity of precipitation, according to researchers.

The team couldn't quantify the scale of the impact because of the uncertainties in the results.

There is a small chance of such an event happening in the coming year, according to the scientists.

In the two months since flooding began in Pakistan, tens of millions of people have been affected and at least 1,500 people have died.

Many areas were swamped by flash floods due to the heavy rains.

Climate change was pointed out to be a significant contribution to the desperate scenes from the beginning.

The picture is complicated according to the first scientific analysis.

The heatwaves that hit India and Pakistan earlier this year were easy to attribute to climate change.

Extreme rain events are difficult to assess. Pakistan is located on the edge of the monsoon region, where the pattern of rain varies from year to year.

The last major floods in Pakistan were caused by large-scale weather events such as La Nia.

Scientists recorded an increase of 50% over the Indus river basin during the 60 day period of the heaviest rain this summer.

Climate models were used to figure out how likely these events would be.

There were a lot of uncertainties in the results of the models that indicated that the increases in rainfall intensity could all be due to climate change.

Friederike Otto from Imperial College London is one of the authors of the report.

Climate projections have been predicting this for a long time. Since humans started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of heavy rain. Our analysis shows that further warming will make the heavy rains even more intense.

The fingerprints of global warming can be seen in the contribution of climate change.

The heavy rain that Pakistan experienced this year has a 1% chance of occurring in any given year, although this estimate does come with a large range of uncertainty.

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