Fingerprints of climate change are increasingly appearing in extreme weather
SAN FRANCISCO — Extremely low sea ice in the Bering Sea. Heavy rainfall in the mid-Atlantic United States. Wildfires in northeast Australia. Examinations of these and 16 other extreme weather events that occurred in 2018 found that all but one were made more likely due to human-caused climate change, scientists reported December 9 at a news conference at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting. Insufficient observational data made it impossible to assess the influence of climate change on the one event, heavy rains in Tasmania. The new report marks the third year in a row that scientists have identified specific weather events that they said would not have happened without human activities that are altering Earth’s climate. The findings are part of a climate-attribution special issue, called “Explaining extreme events in 2018 from a climate perspective,” published online December 9 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Over the 11 years that BAMS has published the special issue, it’s included 168 studies examining specific weather...