Part Two / How our Planet is Changing

2.7 Dangerous Weather

All online sources accessed on

  1. most people are experiencing it through extreme weather events Harrington, L. J., and Otto, F. E. L., ‘Adapting attribution science to the climate extremes of tomorrow’, Environmental Research Letters, 13 (12), 2018: Article 12306, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaf4cc.

    impact on weather on a daily basis Sippel, S., et al., ‘Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale’, Nature Climate Change, 10 (1), 2020: 35–41, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0666-7.

    in a warmer climate more extreme heatwaves would occur National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change(Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.17226/21852.

    Attribution science is straightforward in theory Otto, F. E. L., ‘Attribution of weather and climate events’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 42, 2017: 627–46, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-102016-060847.

  2. Over the past decade the science has progressed Van Oldenborgh, G. J., et al., ‘Pathways and pitfalls in extreme event attribution’, Climate Change, 166 (1–2), 2021: Article 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03071-7.

    ‘Human-induced climate change is already affecting’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘Summary for policymakers’, in Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/.

    the case of Hurricane Harvey Risser, M. D., and Wehner, M. F., ‘Attributable human-induced changes in the likelihood and magnitude of the observed extreme precipitation during Hurricane Harvey’, Geophysical Research Letters, 44 (24), 2017: 12457–64, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL075888; van Oldenborgh, G. J., et al., ‘Attribution of extreme rainfall from Hurricane Harvey, August 2017’, Environmental Research Letters, 12 (12), 2017: Article 124009, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aa9ef2.

    overall costs of the rainfall associated with the storm Frame, D. J., et al., ‘The economic costs of Hurricane Harvey attributable to climate change’, Climate Change, 160 (2), 2020: 271–81, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02692-8.

    70,000 fewer people would have been affected Strauss, B. H., et al., ‘Economic damages from Hurricane Sandy attributable to sea level rise caused by anthropogenic climate change’, Nature Communications, 12, 2021: Article 2720, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22838-1.

    slower-moving storms mean that more rain can be dumped Seneviratne, S. I., et al., ‘Weather and climate extreme events in a changing climate’ in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Change, ed. V. Masson-Delmotte et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press), https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/.