PLEA Network

10 December 2018, Washington Post. Climate change was behind 15 weather disasters in 2017. A drought scorched the Great Plains, causing wildfires and $2.5 billion in agriculture losses. Catastrophic floods submerged more than a third of Bangladesh. Record-shattering heat waves killed scores of people in Europe and China. These were among 15 extreme weather events in 2017 that were made more likely by human-caused climate change, according to in-depth studies published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. At least one episode — a devastating marine heat wave off the coast of Australia that cooked ecosystems and damaged fisheries — would have been “virtually impossible” without human influence, scientists said. The findings, presented Monday at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, underscore the degree to which climate change is already harming human society, researchers said. “People used to talk about climate change as a very complex and difficult problem of the future — something that would happen in places far away and on long time scales,” said Jeff Rosenfeld, the Bulletin’s editor in chief. “But hurricanes and wildfires and bleaching and drought . . . they’re happening to us right now, and we face new and challenging risks of how they’re going to affect us in the future.” The Bulletin has published an “Explaining Extremes” report, which seeks to determine which weather events can be attributed to climate change, every year since 2011. This is the second consecutive year that scientists have identified an event that could not have happened without human-induced warming. This year’s report features 17 peer-reviewed analyses of 16 disasters by 120 researchers looking at weather across six continents and two oceans. Each study uses historical records and model simulations to determine how much climate change may have influenced a particular event. Read More here