"Nature: Strong Evidence Manmade ‘Unprecedented Heat And Rainfall Extremes Are Here … Causing Intense Human Suffering’"
It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without
"Nature: Strong Evidence Manmade ‘Unprecedented Heat And Rainfall Extremes Are Here … Causing Intense Human Suffering’"
It is very likely that several of the unprecedented extremes of the past decade would not have occurred without anthropogenic global warming.
That’s the conclusion of a major new analysis of the scientific evidence in Nature Climate Change, “A decade of weather extremes” (subs. req’d). The research is by Dim Coumou and Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
The study includes this table of extreme events — “The selection criterion for this (incomplete) list was that the event was documented to be record-breaking (that is, unprecedented) in a long measurement series”:
The study points out how devastating some of these events have been for people:
The Moscow heatwave and Pakistan flooding that year illustrated how destructive extreme weather can be to societies: the death toll in Moscow has been estimated at 11,000 and drought caused grain-harvest losses of 30%, leading the Russian government to ban wheat exports. At the same time Pakistan was hit by the worst flooding in its history, which affected approximately one-fifth of its total land area and 20 million people.
It explains that the context for these events is unprecedented human-caused global warming:
The unprecedented meteorological events listed in Table 1 occurred in a decade that was likely the warmest globally for at least a millennium
A number of these individual events have been the subject of “attribution” analysis making clear that they would have been extremely unlikely to have happened without human caused global warming (see Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming” and ”Study Finds 80% Chance Russia’s 2010 July Heat Record Would Not Have Occurred Without Climate Warming,” also by Rahmstorf and Coumou).
In addition, we’ve had analyses link recent drought and dust-bowlification to warming — see NOAA Bombshell: Human-Caused Climate Change Already a Major Factor in More Frequent Mediterranean Droughts:
“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., lead author.
The new study was of course completed before the blow-out, all-time record winter/spring heat wave, which ma