Author: Carolyn Gramling / Source: Science News for Students
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A months-long heat wave scorched the Tasman Sea near New Zealand. Six straight days of rain flooded Bangladesh. Extreme summer drought parched Montana and the Dakotas. All of these extreme weather events happened in 2017. And all became more likely because of human-driven climate change, new studies find.
Each year since 2011, groups of scientists have studied links between climate and extreme weather events around the world. They hope to learn whether climate change is making such events more likely or more intense. And in most cases, the answer is yes, the scientists reported on December 10, 2018. Some of the researchers spoke that day at a news conference at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting. The full collection of studies also was published online the same day. It came out as a special issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Climate change increased the likelihood of 16 extreme weather events in 2017, the studies found. For an intense outbreak of wildfires in Australia, it was unclear if climate played a role. But for the first time, none of the extreme events studied was found to be due to natural variations in climate.
And one of the events would not have happened at all without human-caused climate change, the scientists concluded. It’s only the second time such an event has been reported. The first was just last year. To the editors of the special issue, the latest findings reveal a new “normal” state of the world.
“Many events were found to have appreciable climate change input. That’s not itself a surprise,” Martin Hoerling reported at the news conference. A research meteorologist, he works for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. He also served as an editor of the special issue. “We are in a world that is warmer than it was in the 20th century,” he said. “And we keep moving away from that baseline.”
The Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, has heated up before. It’s seen several marine heat waves in the last…
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