Extreme weather linked to climate change

Rosanne Skirble in Voice of America: No evidence has linked extreme weather events to climate change, until now. New research suggests devastating floods, droughts and storms were exacerbated by human-induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels in our cars, factories and homes. The new report, released by British and American climate agencies, analyzes a dozen extreme weather events which occurred worldwide in 2012.

“What they find is [with] about half of the events," said Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, "the analyses reveal compelling evidence that human-caused change was a factor contributing to the extreme event.” 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre edited the report. Co-editor and NOAA scientist Thomas Peterson says natural weather patterns and human induced climate change are factors in the intensity and evolution of events.

While last year’s spring and summer heat waves in the United States are attributed to normal atmospheric dynamics, climate scientists found that is not the entire story. “They estimated that human caused climate change contributed about one-third of the magnitude of that warmth," Peterson said. "Or in terms of risk, greenhouse warming had already made very large seasonal departures from normal, like the temperatures in the spring in the Eastern U.S. about 12 times more likely to occur.”

The report also blamed human-caused climate change for the warmer ocean and atmosphere that drove the loss of sea ice in the Arctic....

In New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina, 2005, shot by Infrogmation, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.