Wild Weather Events Last Year Goosed by Warming

Anchor Scott Pelley ruled in an opening tease that “tornadoes in Texas” struck “on the same day that a new study blames climate change for a surge in severe storms and wildfires.” .

Human-caused climate change contributed to many extreme weather and climate events in 2014, according to a report by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A killer snowstorm in the Himalayas, a scorching heat wave in Argentina and lashing rainfall in southern France previous year were all made worse by climate change, global scientists said Thursday. In a series of papers in a 180-page, peer-reviewed report, the scientists spotted a few effects of climate change in half of them. “Until this is fully realized, communities would be well-served to look beyond the range of past extreme events to guide future resiliency efforts”.

The scientists, however, did not discern the influence of climate change in every event, nor did they see it playing a consistent role in certain types of events, like drought.

A long exposure image shows the El Portal Fire burning near Yosemite National Park, California in late July 2014. The margin of error is 2-8-4.3 percent. “Those are the things they look at statistically to figure out how likely a particular event was to have occurred or the intensity of that event would have occurred”. Other events, like droughts in East Africa and the Middle East, California’s intense wildfires, and winter storms that continually swept across the eastern USA, were harder to pinpoint. Also, the tropical storms and hurricanes that hit Hawaii in 2014 were substantially more likely because of it.

COHEN: Climate change is causing a lot of unfortunate, disastrous impacts around the world.

The Argentinean heat wave of December 2013 was made five times more likely because of human-induced climate change. Also, human activities led to an increase in the probability of record annual mean warmth over Europe, NW Atlantic, and NE Pacific.

The role of climate change in the Middle East drought of 2014 remains unclear.

Drought in northeastern Asia, China and Singapore could not conclusively be linked to climate change.

In North America, human-induced climate change has increased the overall probability of wildfires in California, though the study didn’t find a direct link to 2014 fires.

Climate scientists and social scientists say that relative indifference is keeping the American public from demanding and getting the changes that are necessary to prevent global warming from reaching a crisis. The widespread algae bloom is because of unusually high temperatures in the Pacific.

Four independent studies all pointed toward human influence causing a substantial increase in the likelihood and severity of heat waves across Australia in 2014.

It is likely that human influences on climate increased the odds of the extreme high pressure anomalies south of Australia in August 2014 that were associated with frosts, lowland snowfalls and reduced rainfall. For other events, like the drought in Brazil and flooding in the Canadian prairies, humans influenced the likelihood in other ways besides the greenhouse gases that continue to be emitted into the atmosphere. This type of event is becoming less likely because of climate change.

Climate change’s influence would make a cold snap such as the one that occurred in the USA upper Midwest 20 to 100 times less likely, but it happened anyway, Herring said.

“Some of these events are climate surprises”, said Marty Hoerling, a report co-editor from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory. The report includes a global authorship from 21 countries.

Center Director Tom Karl said he agreed with that.

The survey found partisan differences between conservative and left-wing views of climate change in several countries – and the starkest differences in the United States.