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18.12.2017

American Meteorological Society (AMS): Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective

This Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) special report presents assessments of how human-caused climate change may have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events. This report is the first of these series to find that some extreme events were not possible in a preindustrial climate.

BAMS Special Report Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective - Title 
Quelle: American Meteorological Society, 2017 Quelle: American Meteorological Society, 2017

In the six years scientists have been producing this annual report, this is the first time they have found that extreme events could not have happened without human-caused warming of the climate through increases in greenhouse gases.

The 2016 record global heat, the heat across Asia, as well as a marine heat wave off the coast of Alaska would not have been possible without human-caused climate change.

"This report marks a fundamental change," says Jeff Rosenfeld, editor-in-chief of BAMS. “For years scientists have known humans are changing the risk of some extremes. But finding multiple extreme events that weren’t even possible without human influence makes clear that we're experiencing new weather, because we've made a new climate.”

While these results are novel, they were not unexpected. Climate attribution scientists have been predicting that eventually the influence of human-caused climate change would become sufficiently strong as to push events beyond the bounds of natural variability alone. It was also predicted that we would first observe this phenomenon for heat events where the climate change influence is most pronounced. Additional retrospective analysis will reveal if, in fact, these are the first events of their kind or were simply some of the first to be discovered.

The new report presents 27 peer-reviewed analyses of extreme weather across five continents and two oceans during 2016. It features the research of 116 scientists from 18 countries looking at both historical observations and model simulations to determine whether and by how much climate change may have influenced particular extreme events. As in previous years, most of this year’s studies found effects of human-caused climate change in extreme weather and climate. About 20 percent of the events studied in this report were not linked by the findings to any appreciable influence of human-caused climate change.

More at American Meteorological Society’s website (download of the special report, download by chapter, downloads of 'Three Extreme Events That Were Not Possible in a Preindustrial Climate', press release, summary of results,…)

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