Recent weather events such as deadly heat waves and devastating floods have sparked popular interest in understanding the role of global warming in driving extreme weather.
These events are part of a new pattern of more extreme weather across the globe, shaped in part by human-induced climate change. All weather events are now influenced by climate change because all weather now develops in a different environment than before.
While natural variability continues to play a key role in extreme weather, climate change has shifted the odds and changed the natural limits, making certain types of extreme weather more frequent and more intense.
The kinds of extreme weather events that would be expected to occur more often in a warming world are indeed increasing. Rigorous analyses have shown that natural variability alone cannot explain the observed long-term trends of changing extremes in temperature and precipitation.
In contrast, the observed trends fit well with our understanding of how climate change drives changes in weather. Computer models of the climate that include both natural forces as well as human influences are consistent with observed global trends in heat waves, warm days and nights, and frost days over the last four decades.
Human influence has also been shown to have contributed to the increase of heavy precipitation over the Northern Hemisphere.
Extreme weather events do not have a single cause but instead have various possible contributing factors – and human-induced climate change is now one of those factors.
By. Sofia Carrillo 3B
No comments:
Post a Comment