Three extremes in 2016 'not ... possible' without human warming » Yale Climate Connections
For the first time, an annual report issued by the American Meteorological Society has found that the extreme magnitudes of three weather events in 2016 “was not possible without the influence of human-caused climate change.”
Explaining Extreme Events of 2016 from a Climate Perspective, published as a supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), is AMS’s sixth annual report on extreme weather events. It was officially released and presented on December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.
The report includes 27 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Authors of those papers examined 21 different extreme weather events around the globe in 2016 – including wildfires in North America and Australia, droughts in South Africa and Brazil, cold snaps in Eastern China, and an anomalous body of warm water in the Pacific Ocean.
Two-thirds of papers found human-caused influence
Of the 27 papers presented in the AMS annual report, 18 found that anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change influenced the event they studied. But three papers in particular concluded that the extremes of three of the events they examined would not have happened in the absence of that human-caused climate change. More
