How does climate change affect extreme weather disasters?

Climate change drives rising global temperatures and system-wide changes that can make extreme weather events like heat waves, cold waves, droughts, and intense storms more frequent and more severe. While individual weather events are also influenced by natural climate variability, attribution science evaluates the specific role that human-caused global warming plays in these disasters. These extreme weather phenomena cause severe social costs, including loss of human life, infrastructure damage, and ecosystem destruction.

What we know

• Climate change might make certain extreme weather events, particularly heat waves and cold waves, more frequent and more intense. [2]
• Higher temperatures driven by climate change are causing more intense storms, droughts, and other weather extremes. [3]
• Extreme event attribution science evaluates the relative contributions of multiple causes and identifies the role that human-caused climate change plays in individual extreme weather events. [4]
• Extreme weather includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather at the extremes of the historical distribution for a given location. [2]

Still open

• While global system-wide changes lead to increased frequency or intensity of extreme weather, individual events cannot generally be attributed to any single cause without specialized attribution science.

Where to go next

• what caused itWhat causes modern climate change?
• what followedWhat are the wider effects of global warming?
• how it workedHow does extreme event attribution work?
• the bigger pictureHow do natural climate phenomena like El Niño impact weather?
• a case in pointHow can societies adapt to climate risks?
• an unexpected connectionHow do historical industrial practices relate to modern extreme weather?Greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel burning since the Industrial Revolution trap heat in the lower atmosphere, directly driving the global warming that intensifies modern extreme weather events.

Sources

• [1]extreme weather event (Wikidata Q1277161) · CC0 1.0
• [2]Extreme weather · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [3]Climate change · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [4]Extreme event attribution · CC BY-SA 4.0
• [5]Avoiding dangerous climate change · CC BY-SA 4.0