Study Links Man-Made Climate Changes To Extreme Weather Events

New study results say they can directly tie severe droughts and extreme weather events to climate changes.

This week, Noah Diffenbaugh of Stanford University released the results of a new study. These claim that they can directly tie severe droughts and extreme weather events to climate changes. As more and more data adds up, most of those changes are reportedly caused by human activity.

Climate Is Not Weather, But…

This new study looked at the recent events of the last few years and compared them to the frequency of similar events in previous decades. As it did so, it tried to find differences in severity, as well as what might be the cause of those differences.

“Our results suggest that the world isn’t quite at the point where every record hot event has a detectable human fingerprint, but we are getting close.” Diffenbaugh said.

In reference to the low Arctic sea ice in 2012, he replied that it would have been “extremely unlikely” to achieve such levels without the influence of global warming. Currently, the sea ice extent is at record-low values.This relatively new field of study is called extreme weather attribution. Reports show that the scientists’ interest in it by scientists is growing. Questions often arise after extreme weather events, whether it be a hurricane or a drought. These ask whether the phenomenon is something more extreme than those in the past. Or is it that these events happen more often? Maybe it is both? This new field of science is aimed directly at producing the data necessary to find that out.

In the past, scientists have often avoided direct linkage of specific events to climate changes due to naturally fluctuating patterns. New research is pointing out that this may not be possible anymore.

Diffenbaugh also pointed out the “explosion of research”. This has been growing stronger over the last decade. It also reached the point where it will only take a few weeks after a major event to release research results on the matter. If events continue to increase in severity and regularity, this new field may become quite important.

Image Source: Pixabay

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Cristopher Hall

Christopher Hall completed his studies at the California Institute of Technology, Caltech, with a degree in Engineering and Applied Science. That was three years ago. At present he is working as a Computation and Neural Systems engineer in Ontario. He used to write tech reviews and overviews for several small online publications before he joined the ArgyllFreePress team. Christopher is always scouring the internet for fresh tech news and anything related to gadgets, smart-phones, tablets and laptops.