Three in Every Four Extremely Hot Days Linked to Climate Change
If climate change was a game, we’d have racked up quite a score. A fresh study suggests that humans are responsible for a hefty number of today’s extreme hot days and rainstorms.
Weather extremes, such as a Russian heatwave in 2010 and a drought in Texas in 2011, have been blamed on climate change before - but the attribution of individual events to it is still hotly debated.
So Erich Fischer and Reto Knutti at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, Switzerland, took a bird’s-eye view of how human activity is changing the planet. Using 25 different climate models, they calculated how the odds of unusual events - such as a 1-in-100 day temperature high or a 1-in-10,000 day rainfall event - have changed with the rise in global temperatures.
More: Three in Every Four Extremely Hot Days Linked to Climate Change - Environment - 28 April 2015