NOAA - Of 30 Floods, Heatwaves In 2015, 24 Directly Tied To Warming Earth
n late September of 2015, residents of Miami woke up to find their streets inundated with several feet of water. But the flooding wasn’t brought by intense rainfall or a tropical storm — it was the result of historically high tides combined with rapidly rising sea levels. In other words, the flooding was due — at least in part — to climate change.
That’s the conclusion that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reached in its annual analysis of how climate change did — or did not — increase the likelihood of key weather events throughout the year. The report, released Thursday, looked at 30 “strange” weather events that took place throughout 2015, from the sunny day flooding in Florida to extremely cold weather in the Northeast. Of those 30 events, NOAA scientists found that 24 of them had been influenced by climate change. “It has to be measureable,” NOAA scientist Stephanie Herring, co-editor of the report, told the Associated Press, explaining the study’s methodology. “It has to be detectable. There has to be evidence for it and that’s what these papers do.”
Heat waves, wildfires, and the sunny day flooding in Miami were all linked to climate change. Other events, like extreme downpours in Nigeria and India, and extremely cold weather in the northeastern United States, did not exhibit signs of climate change (though there has been some debate about the influence of climate change in the 2015 cold snap that brought record lows to much of the Northeast).
The NOAA report, which was worked on by 116 scientists from around the world, did not seek to determine whether climate change “caused” any of the extreme weather events, but rather, whether climate change made the events more likely. It’s a distinction that might seem like splitting hairs, but it’s actually an important one — think of it like the odds of a basketball player making a basket from various positions on the court. If the player started at half court, she might miss most of her shots, but she would still make a few baskets every once in a while. If she took a step forward, she would make a few more baskets. If she took steps forward until she was right under the hoop, she would make far more baskets than when she had been back at half court. The steps that the player is taking, in this case, are like climate change — each step towards the basket makes it more likely that the ball will go in, but it’s impossible to say that the step is the thing that caused the ball to go in, since she would have made baskets at half court some of the time.
EDIT
https://thinkprogress.org/extreme-weather-2015-climate-change-c105d5a04015#.p1avoqje3
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