Record-breaking weather events, especially heat waves but also downpours and droughts, can be linked to man-made global warming, a new study says.
“Our results suggest that the world isn’t quite at the point where every record hot event has a detectable human fingerprint, but we are getting close,” said study lead author Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University.
It’s the first research to look specifically at the link between record weather events of the past several decades and climate change. Diffenbaugh and his team found that in over 80% of the heat records — which included both record hot days and months — there was a clear-cut signal of global warming.
Global warming blamed for record-breaking weather worldwide, scientists say