Texas residents sit with their dog in the back of a truck waiting to be rescued from rising floodwaters caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.A decade ago, scientists would say they were pretty sure a specific hurricane, heatwave, flood, drought or raging wildfire was more severe due to climate change, but they could rarely pinpoint its exact contribution.
More than 400 extreme weather events, many in the past few years, have been studied to determine to what extent the grade of the phenomenon was driven by climate change. Scientists have calculated, for example, that total rainfall from six of the major hurricanes that struck the Atlantic coast in the past 20 years—Katrina, Irma, Maria, Harvey, Dorian, and Florence—and which collectively caused more than $500 billion in damage, were four to 15 times more intense than they would have been had the Earth been cooler.due to climate change, a Climate Central analysis found.
As soon as massive downpours began flowing in Dubai in mid-April this year—in which up to 10 inches of rain fell in less than two days—researchers at WWA dug into the data. A week after the rain, they reported that such an event became twice as likely from today’s climate.