Get ready for hotter summers and more flooding in the UK

Roz Pidcock in the Carbon Brief: Weather-wise, the UK saw it all last year. The coldest spring for 50 years, a sweltering summer heat wave and the wettest winter since records began. Today, a new report examines whether climate change is upping the odds of these events occurring.

The collection of papers, published in a bumper edition of journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, looks at 16 weather events that took place last year across the world. From Colorado to Korea, the scientists examine heatwaves, droughts, heavy rain and storms.

Globally, there is evidence for changes in some types of extreme weather, and evidence for a human fingerprint in those changes. But different types of event are affected differently. Climate change is greatly increasing the odds of heatwaves worldwide, today's report concludes. For storms, rainfall and drought the picture is less clear, however. Big differences between regions, natural variability in the climate and limited data make detecting changes over time far more difficult.

The science of disentangling human and natural influences on our climate is known as attribution. Dr Peter Stott, head of the climate change detection and attribution team at the Met Office and an editor on the report, explained more in a recent guest blog  for us: "[The aim is] to compare what actually happened with what might have happened in a world without anthropogenic climate change."

Understanding how our activities are changing the risk of some types of extremes is important for making decisions about how we can prepare for the future.,,,

Beach volleyball at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, shot by cdephotos - DSC02805, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons 2.0 license