![]() ![]() Scientists might study that storm and find it was 10 times more likely to happen because of climate change. In the past, such a storm would have been very rare – a once-in-a-lifetime event. Wehner points out that, for more common types of dangerous weather, more detailed numbers can be helpful because they tell people how often they’ll need to cope with certain events.įor example, imagine there’s a thunderstorm that drops a lot more rain than usual and floods your house. “But that’s probably not useful to understand that was basically not going to happen in a preindustrial world.” Or that it was about 150 times more likely today than it was in a preindustrial climate, ” says Luke Harrington, a senior research fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand who studies climate change and extreme weather. “We could say was a 1 in 1000 year event in today’s climate. That has upsides and downsidesĬlimate scientists tend to stay away from the word “cause.” They opt instead for numbers that explain exactly how likely an extreme weather event was, compared to a world before humans started burning large quantities of fossil fuels.īut many scientists are aware that, for the public, those numbers might not mean much. Most scientists communicate with statistics. “It was virtually impossible without climate change,” says Wehner.Īnother way to say that? Climate change caused last summer’s extreme heat wave. ![]() When scientists analyzed how climate change affected that heat wave, they found something startling. Temperatures reached 120 degrees in parts of Canada, and hit 115 degrees in Oregon and Washington. Many cities, such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Houston, set new heat records almost every summer.īut scientists can go even further, using supercomputers and advanced statistics to analyze the most extreme heat waves, like the one that killed hundreds of people in Canada and the Pacific Northwest in 2021. and Texas experienced record-breaking temperatures during a heat wave this June. Millions of people living in more than a dozen cities in the Western U.S. You can see those extra degrees in action when heat records fall over and over. “For garden variety heat waves – like the hottest day of the year, or the hottest day every 10 years – in the U.S., climate change has increased that heat wave’s temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit,” Wehner explains. ![]() “It seems obvious that as the global climate warms, heat waves would also warm,” says Wehner. Heat waves have the clearest connection to global warming. Or that without global warming, the disaster would not have happened at all.Ĭlimate change makes every heat wave worse For some types of weather, it’s become possible to say exactly how much worse it was because of climate change. Now, scientists can answer those questions with more and more certainty. “You have some extreme weather disaster, and people want to know: Did climate change flood my house? Did climate change make it so hot that my power went out?” says Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who studies how climate change influences extreme weather. But such sweeping statements can feel impersonal, when really what you want to know is: has climate change affected me? Extreme weather is more likely as the Earth gets hotter. Or a powerful hurricane that seemed to materialize overnight.Ĭlimate change is part of that story. Or a thunderstorm that dropped a scary amount of rain. Maybe it was a heat wave that was hotter and longer than you’d ever experienced. Chances are, if you live on Earth, you’ve experienced some strange, or downright dangerous, weather in the last few years.
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