Climate change is driving 2022 extreme heat and flooding

Extreme weather events from scorched heat waves to extraordinary heavy rain have caused a wide upheaval worldwide this year, with thousands of people killed and millions of people more displaced.

In the last three months, the rain of the rainy season released disaster floods in Bangladesh, and brutal heat waves burned South Asia and Europe. Meanwhile, a prolonged drought has caused millions of starving people in East Africa.

Many of this, said scientists, are what is expected of climate change.

On Tuesday, the climate scientist team published a study in the journal Environmental Research: Climate. The researchers examined the role of climate change that had been played in individual weather events over the past two decades.

These findings confirm a warning about how global warming will change our world – and also clarify what information is lost.

For heat waves and extreme rainfall, “We found we had a much better understanding of how the intensity of this event changed due to climate change,” said colleague of study writer Luke Harrington, a climate scientist at the Victoria University of Wellington.

However, less understood is how climate change affects forest fires and drought.

For their review papers, scientists use hundreds of “attribution” studies, or research aimed at calculating how climate change affects extreme events using computer simulations and weather observations.

There is also a large data gap in many low and middle income countries, making it more difficult to understand what is happening in the area, said fellow writer Friederike Otto, one of the climatologies that led the International Research Collaboration World Weather Attribution (WWA).

HEATWAVES

With hot waves, it is very possible that climate change makes everything worse.

“Almost all heat waves around the world have been made more intense and more likely by climate change,” said colleague of study author Ben Clarke, an environmental scientist at the University of Oxford.

In general, the heat wave that previously had a chance of 1 in 10 to occur now is almost three times more likely – and peaked at a temperature of around 1 degrees Celsius higher than it should be without climate change.

A April heat wave that saw Mercury rising above 50C (122 Fahrenheit) in India and Pakistan, for example, was made 30 times more likely by climate change, according to WWA. Read more

The heat wave crossed the northern hemisphere in June – from Europe to the United States – highlighting “what was shown by our review paper that the frequency of heat waves had increased,” Otto said.

RAINFALL AND FLOODING

Last week, China saw a vast flood, after heavy rains. At the same time, Bangladesh was beaten with floods that triggered floods. Read more

Overall, heavy rainfall episodes become more common and more intense. That’s because warmer air has more moisture, so the storm cloud is “heavier” before it finally breaks.

However, the impact varies by region, with some regions not receiving enough rain, the research said.

DROUGHT

Scientists have a more difficult time to find out how climate change affects drought.

Some areas experience sustainable drought. A warmer temperature in Western US, for example, melts snowpack faster and driving evaporation, the research said.

And while East African drought has not been directly linked to climate change, scientists said the decline in spring rainy season was related to warmer waters in the Indian Ocean. This causes rain to fall quickly over the sea before reaching the horns. Read more

WILDFIRE

Heat waves and drought conditions are also a deteriorating forest fire, especially megafir – which burns more than 100,000 hectares.

Fire raging throughout the state of New Mexico in April, after the burns were controlled under “conditions that were much drier than those recognized” out of control, according to the U.S. Forestry Service. Fire burned 341,000 hectares. Read more

TROPICAL CYCLONES

On a global scale, the frequency of the storm has not increased. However, Typhoon is now more common in Central Pacific and North Atlantic, and less in Bay Bengal, West Pacific and South Indian Ocean, the research said.

There is also evidence that tropical storms become more intense and even land traffic, where they can provide more rain in one area.

So, while climate change may not make Typhoon Batsirai more likely to be formed in February, it might make it more intense, able to destroy more than 120,000 homes when crashing into Madagascar.