27 April 2015
Was Your Record High Temperature A Result of Climate Change? Probably.
Posted by Dan Satterfield
Climate change includes not only changes in mean climate but also in weather extremes. For a few prominent heatwaves and heavy precipitation events a human contribution to their occurrence has been demonstrated1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Here we apply a similar framework but estimate what fraction of all globally occurring heavy precipitation and hot extremes is attributable to warming. We show that at the present-day warming of 0.85 °C about 18% of the moderate daily precipitation extremes over land are attributable to the observed temperature increase since pre-industrial times, which in turn primarily results from human influence6. For 2 °C of warming the fraction of precipitation extremes attributable to human influence rises to about 40%. Likewise, today about 75% of the moderate daily hot extremes over land are attributable to warming. It is the most rare and extreme events for which the largest fraction is anthropogenic, and that contribution increases nonlinearly with further warming.
This means that about 75% of daily temperature records are the result of the warming we have already experienced, and the paper says this number will rise rapidly as we get warmer. This research dove-tails with the graphic above based on research by Gerald Meehl at UCAR in 2009.You can read the Nature Climate Change paper here: