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.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2018/12/10/climate-change-was-behind-weather-disasters/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.995fdaf5738b
Flood-affected villagers wait for relief assistance Aug. 15, 2017, on a washed-out road in Morigaon district in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. (Anupam Nath/AP)