The savage heat waves that struck Australia in 2013 were almost certainly a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, researchers said Monday. It is perhaps the most definitive statement climate scientists have made that ties a specific weather event to global warming.
Five groups of researchers, using distinct methods, analyzed the heat that baked Australia for much of last year and continued into 2014, shutting down the Australian Open tennis tournament at one point in January. All five came to the conclusion that last year's heat waves could not have been as severe without the long-term climatic warming caused by human activity.
'When we look at the heat across the whole of Australia and the whole 12 months of 2013, we can say that this was virtually impossible without climate change,' said David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne who led one research team.
Three other research groups analyzed the drought afflicting California, but could not come to a unanimous conclusion about whether the odds had been increased by human emissions. One paper found that they had been; two others found no clear evidence of that.
Researchers generally agreed, however, that regardless of the cause, the effects of the California drought have been made worse by global warming. That is because whatever rain does fall in California tends to evaporate faster in the hotter climate, leading to drier conditions.
Two dozen papers analyzing weather extremes from 2013 were published on Monday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This look back at the prior year has become an annual event, as scientists increasingly try to answer the question many ordinary people are asking after every extreme weather event: Did climate change have anything to do with it?
For numerous events in 2013, they were able to rule that out. Even though the overall global warming trend has been definitively linked to human emissions in scores of papers, the new reports show that the frequent rush to attribute specific weather events to human activity is not always well grounded.
For instance, one research group found that the type of extreme rainfall that struck parts of Colorado last September had become less likely, not more likely, in the warming climate. Another group found no increase in the likelihood of heavy rains and floods that struck parts of Central Europe in June that could be attributed to global warming, even though such claims were made at the time.
Myles R. Allen, a researcher at Oxford University in Britain whose group conducted the latter study, noted in an interview that the science of attributing specific events to human emissions was still contentious and difficult, so any answers given today must be regarded as provisional.
His group has found a measure of human influence on several weather events over the years. But with the science still emerging, he cautioned against the impulse to cite global warming as a cause of almost any kind of severe weather.
'If we don't have evidence, I don't think we should hint darkly all the time that human influence must be to blame somehow,' Dr. Allen said.
The new batch of reports analyzed extreme heat in 2013 not only in Australia, but also in Europe, China, Japan and Korea, with the researchers concluding in every case that global warming had made the occurrence of the heat extremes more likely.
In the Australian case, computers were used to analyze what the climate would likely be in the absence of human emissions. They were simply unable to produce a year as extreme as 2013, and other analytical methods yielded similar answers.
But computer analyses that factored in greenhouse gases and the warming they are causing showed an increasing likelihood of extraordinary heat waves in Australia.
'Five reports all showing the same thing is a very powerful signal,' said Thomas C. Peterson, principal scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., a unit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In addition to the Colorado and central European rains, the 2013 events for which scientists were able to rule out a human contribution included a blizzard in South Dakota, heavy snowfall in the Pyrenees in Europe, and a cyclone that swept across northwestern Europe in late October.
The new reports come as scientists, responding to popular demand, are trying to speed up their analysis of extreme weather events and the role of greenhouse gases.
It used to take them years to come to a clear view of any particular event; now, papers are being published within several months. By sometime next year, researchers hope to reduce that to a matter of days, with three groups of researchers around the world training their sights on extreme events as soon as they occur, then putting out reports while the public is still discussing the aftermath.
'We want to get to this place where we can answer the question when the media are asking it,' said Heidi Cullen, a scientist with Climate Central, a news and research organization in Princeton, N.J., who is helping to lead the effort. 'We want to give the first, best answer we can possibly give.'
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