The link between climate change and weather events is only possible because the two scientists who founded the WWA – Dr Otto and a Dutch climatologist called Geert Jan van Oldenborgh – pioneered a way to track global warming in catastrophic weather events.
They knew that weather records showed that extreme weather events were becoming more intense. What’s more, a huge body of peer-reviewed science explained how warming the atmosphere can intensify extreme weather. What was missing was the link between a single event to rising global temperatures.
For years forecasters have been using atmospheric models to predict future weather patterns. Otto and Oldenborgh repurposed the models to run repeated simulations to work out how likely a weather event was in the current climate.
They also created parallel simulations which explored how likely the same event was in a world in which the industrial revolution had never happened. These computer models stripped out the effects of the billions of tonnes of CO2 that humans have pumped into the atmosphere.
The calculations meant they could compare how likely the same event was with and without the 1.2C of global warming that the world has already experienced since the industrial revolution.
“The massive death tolls we keep seeing in extreme weather shows we are not well prepared for 1.3°C of warming, let alone 1.5°C or 2°C”, said Roop Singh, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre which supports the WWA.
She said today’s study showed the need for all countries to build their resilience to climate change and warned: “With every fraction of a degree of warming, we will see more record-breaking events that push countries to the brink, no matter how prepared they are.”