Using the growing speciality of attribution science, climate experts are increasingly able to link manmade climate change to specific extreme weather events. To calculate the role of climate change on the rainfall that led to the floods, scientists analysed weather records and computer simulations to compare the climate today – which is around 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer due to manmade emissions – with the climate of the past. “Climate change increased the likelihood (of the floods), but climate change also increased the intensity,” said Frank Kreienkamp, from the German Weather Service (DWD). Friederike Otto, associate director of the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, said that the floods showed that “even developed countries are not safe from severe impacts of extreme weather that we have seen and known to get worse with climate change”. This means several events on the scale of the German and Belgian floods are likely across Western Europe within that timeframe, they said.

Source: The Local August 24, 2021 06:56 UTC