Human-caused climate change made the ten deadliest extreme weather events of the last 20 years more intense and more likely, according to new analysis.
The killer storms, heatwaves and floods affected Europe, Africa and Asia killing more than 570,000 people.
The new analysis highlights how scientists can now discern the fingerprint of climate change in complex weather events.
The study involved reanalysing data for some of the extreme weather events and was carried out by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group at Imperial College London.
The researchers focused on the 10 deadliest weather events registered in the International Disaster Database since 2004.
The deadliest event of the last two decades was a drought in Somalia in 2011 which is reckoned to have killed more than 250,000 people. The researchers found the low rainfall that drove the drought was made more likely and more extreme by climate change.
The link between climate change and weather events is only possible because the two scientists who founded the WWA – Dr Otto and a Dutch climatologist called Geert Jan van Oldenborgh – pioneered a way to track global warming in catastrophic weather events.
For years forecasters have been using atmospheric models to predict future weather patterns. Otto and Oldenborgh repurposed the models to run repeated simulations to work out how likely a weather event was in the current climate.
They also created parallel simulations which explored how likely the same event was in a world in which the industrial revolution had never happened. These computer models stripped out the effects of the billions of tonnes of CO2 that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.
The calculations meant they could compare how likely the same event was with and without the 1.2C of global warming that the world has already experienced since the industrial revolution.
“With every fraction of a degree of warming, we will see more record-breaking events that push countries to the brink, no matter how prepared they are.”
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