The IPCC report on what the future holds is bleak. Very bleak. Photo: Matt Howard//Unsplash
A new report from World Weather Attribution, part of the Imperial College of London’s Center for Environmental Policy, says the 10 most extreme weather events of the past two decades were intensified by human-caused climate change, leading to a half-million deaths around the globe. Those natural disasters included three hurricanes, four heatwaves, two droughts, and one flood which together killed 570,000 people.
The study analyzed the deadliest recorded weather events in the International Disaster Database back to 2004. The single deadliest of them all was a drought in Somalia in 2011 that led to the deaths of more than 250,000 people alone. Tropical Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar killed just under 140,000 people in 2008 and in 2010, a heatwave in Russia caused more than 55,000 deaths. Those three weather events alone accounted for a lion’s share of the death toll analyzed in the database. Meanwhile, researchers used computer models they began building after the International Disaster Database was formed 20 years ago to measure how those individual disasters were impacted — either made more likely to occur or made more intense — thanks to human-caused climate change.
“Climate change isn’t a distant threat. It worsened extreme weather events that left more than 570,000 people dead,” Friederike Otto, co-founder and lead of the World Weather Attribution, said in a statement. “This study should be an eye-opener for political leaders hanging on to fossil fuels that heat the planet and destroy lives. If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue.”
Dr. Otto and his research partners relied on the same atmospheric models and forecasts used to predict future weather patterns. They then ran simulations of those same atmospheric models under conditions in which the industrial revolution had never happened, which created their control for man’s influence on climate change. This drew a direct comparison to modern natural disasters with 1.2 Celsius of global warming, and again without.
All this comes just days after the United Nations reported we are on track for three-degree Celsius warming trend by the end of the 21st century.
“The massive death tolls we keep seeing in extreme weather shows we are not well prepared for 1.3-degrees Celsius of warming, let alone 1.5-degrees Celsius or two-degrees Celsius,” said Roop Singh, of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center, which supports the WWA.
