HONG KONG: Did climate change cause that heat wave? That hurricane? That drought?
A new collection of studies examined extreme weather events last year, including drought, floods and storms, to look for signs that climate change was a cause or contributor — and found mixed results.
The papers are part of a broader effort to recognize the effects of climate change as the world warms, and to tease out those factors from other possible causes of extreme events.
Climate change is often discussed in terms of predictions about what may happen in the next 100 years or more as average global temperatures rise.
But an emerging field of science is dedicated to discerning whether climate change is already having effects, and what they might be. The set of 32 studies published Thursday examined 28 extreme weather events in 2014; it is the fourth in a series of annual reports, and appears in The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
