• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022 January 31, 2023
Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB January 31, 2023
Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty January 31, 2023
Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds January 31, 2023
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Next
Prev

Human impacts fuel weather extremes

January 1, 1970
Reading time: 3 minutes
Primary Author: Dave Clare

 

Researchers show that floods and droughts often happen at least in part because of human-induced influences on the climate, and not just from natural causes.

LONDON, 3 February, 2016 – The serious floods that hit southern England in the winter of 2013-14 were at least partly a consequence of climate change [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/uoo-mcc012916.php] driven by the global warming that results from fossil fuel combustion.

  • The climate news you need. Subscribe now to our engaging new weekly digest.
  • You’ll receive exclusive, never-before-seen-content, distilled and delivered to your inbox every weekend.
  • The Weekender: Succinct, solutions-focused, and designed with the discerning reader in mind.
New!
Subscribe

To be precise, the extreme rainfall that led to £431 million (US$622 million) of damage was made 43% more likely by human-induced climate change, according to a new study led by the University of Oxford.

And weather events such extreme drought that has blighted agriculture and blistered the orchards of California can no longer be seen as a purely natural hazard, [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/uob-sdn012816.php] according to a separate study by a team from the University of Birmingham in the UK.

Nathalie Schaller, postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Physics at Oxford,[ https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/], and colleagues report in Nature Climate Change journal[http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2927.html] that the succession of storms that delivered unprecedented amounts of rain to southern England at the close of 2013 could be considered as a once-in-a-century event, but climate change made such a flood measurably more likely.

Citizen science

The researchers used a citizen science project called weather@home [http://www.climateprediction.net/weatherathome/] to model 135,354 simulations of possible weather under current climate conditions and under what modellers call “counterfactual” regimes, in which humans had no influence on the atmospheric chemistry.

In a high proportion of the simulations, human influence increased the amount of water an atmosphere can hold – every 1°C rise in temperature means the air can, in theory, absorb 7% more moisture – while the same warming increased the number of January days with a westerly flow of air. The mix was enough to set the rivers overflowing.

The scientists considered the entire sequence of events and looked at atmospheric circulation, rainfall, river flow, inundation and properties at risk in three counties in the southwest of England and the Thames Valley in the southeast.

“Severe droughts in human-dominated environments, as experienced in recent years in China, Brazil and the USA, cannot be seen as purely natural hazards”

“We found that the extreme rainfall as seen in January 2014 is more likely to occur in a changing climate,” Dr Schaller says. “This is because not only does the higher water-holding capacity lead to increased rainfall, but climate change makes the atmosphere more favourable to low-pressure systems bringing rain from the Atlantic across southern England.”

And in a commentary in Nature Geoscience. http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v9/n2/full/ngeo2646.html a group led by Anne Van Loon, lecturer in physical geography at Birmingham’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, [http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/gees/index.aspx] argues that drought research can no longer be considered just a matter of water availability and socio-economics.

Water management

Europe experienced severe drought and wildfires in 2015, while California has been in the grip of drought for four years. Water managers would have to think again about how they planned for such events.

“Society is not a passive victim of drought,” Dr Van Loon says. “It responds to water shortages, and these responses influence water levels in reservoirs, aquifers and rivers.

“Severe droughts in human-dominated environments, as experienced in recent years in China, Brazil and the USA, cannot be seen as purely natural hazards because human activities play a role.”

So, to manage drought, authorities have to acknowledge that human influence is as integral to it as natural variability. New scientific approaches are needed to disentangle the differing causes of drought, but researchers should also consider the impact of drought on society and how it responds.

“We can see the water system as a bucket of water half-empty due to drought, which needs to be filled up to its original level,” Dr Van Loon says. “We can calculate how much rain is needed to fill up the bucket, but at the same time we are constantly taking water out of the bucket and putting water in.” – Climate News Network



in Climate News Network

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

U.S. Geological Survey/wikimedia commons
Biodiversity & Habitat

Climate Change Amplifies Risk of ‘Insect Apocalypse’

December 1, 2022
43
Alaa Abd El-Fatah/wikimedia commons
COP Conferences

Rights Abuses, Intrusive Conference App Put Egypt Under Spotlight as COP 27 Host

November 14, 2022
26
Western Arctic National Parklands/wikimedia commons
Arctic & Antarctica

Arctic Wildfires Show Approach of New Climate Feedback Loop

January 2, 2023
28

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Mike Mozart/Flickr

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

January 31, 2023
328
RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2.4k
jasonwoodhead23/flickr

Canada, U.K., U.S. Must Cut Oil and Gas 76% by 2030 to Keep 1.5° Alive, New Analysis Finds

March 23, 2022
506
Joshua Doubek/Wikipedia

No New Jobs Came from Alberta’s $4B ‘Job Creation’ Tax Cut for Big Oil

October 6, 2022
502
EcoAnalytics

Albertans Want a Just Transition, Despite Premier’s Grumbling

January 23, 2023
325

Recent Posts

Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
196
CONFENIAE

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
61
Ken Teegardin www.SeniorLiving.Org/flickr

Virtual Power Plants Hit an ‘Inflection Point’

January 31, 2023
125
/snappy goat

Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds

January 31, 2023
94
Victorgrigas/wikimedia commons

World Bank Climate Reforms Too ‘Timid and Slow,’ Critics Warn

January 31, 2023
42
Doc Searls/Twitter

Guilbeault Could Intervene on Ontario Greenbelt Development

January 31, 2023
132
Next Post

Mass extinction forecast with 6C temperature rise

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}