Global Disaster: Climate Change advances in the World

Report Issue

Please complete the required fields.

Your Name

Email

Reason (required)
This post contains broken linksPost has incorrect informationPost has spamCopyright IssueOther

Description

Submit

Deaths in India due to waves of intense heat, more than a dozen Mexican states on the verge of collapse due to high temperatures, droughts and storms in the United States and… we are barely in June.It is evident that climate change is already reaching a limit and the worst disasters are yet to come.

The extreme events are happening against the backdrop of a very fast-warming climate. The world is already 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in pre-industrial times, and the next five years are predicted to be the hottest on record.

People often want to know if an extreme weather event happened because of climate change, said Friederike Otto, climate scientist and co-lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative.

But it is not a simple question. “You can’t answer this with yes or no,” she told journalists at a briefing last week. It is because climate change alters the likelihood and intensity of extreme events, she said.

Otto and other scientists are using a scientific technique to transform our understanding of how this dynamic plays out. And, more often than not, they are finding the clear fingerprints of climate change on extreme weather events.

Called “attribution,” the method involves analyzing real world observations as well as climate models to establish whether a particular extreme event could have happened in a world without global heating.

While attribution studies are not done for every extreme weather event, they help bring home the realities of the direct and immediate damage the climate crisis is doing to people’s lives, which scientists say will only get worse if the world continues to pump out planet-warming pollution.

“We’re always going to have extreme weather, but if we keep driving in this direction, we’re going to have a lot of extreme weather,” said Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

From intense heat and record-breaking drought, to severe storms fueled by hotter air and oceans, here are 10 disasters showing the devastating impacts of the human-caused climate crisis.