Human-caused climate change driven by things like greenhouse gas emissions and land use influenced some specific extreme weather events in 2014, researchers are reporting.
In a report, scientists point to human activities as influencing events such as tropical cyclones in the central Pacific, increased rainfall throughout Europe, heat waves in Asian, Australia and South America, and drought in Africa.
Extreme weather events on every continent except Antarctica were linked to human-caused climate change, say the authors of the report "Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective," published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
An international team of scientists from 32 research organizations analyzed 28 severe weather occurrences in 2014 for evidence of their likelihood or their strength being at least partly increased by global warming as a result of climate change.
They found evidence of such influence in half those weather events, they reported.
Climate change was linked to U.S. weather events including extreme wildfires in California, tropical cyclones around Hawaii and an unusually mild winter in the Midwest, they said.
Climate change was not a factor in other events, including drought in California, extremely cold temperatures in the Eastern U.S. or the exceptionally heavy winter storm season of 2013-2014 in North America, they noted.
Still, they argued, the study does represent strong evidence that human-induced climate change can make certain types of weather events more likely.
"Understanding our influence on specific extreme weather events is ground-breaking science that will help us adapt to climate change," said report lead editor Stephanie C. Herring at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information.
Center Director Tom Karl said he agreed with that.
"As the science of event attribution continues to advance, so too will our ability to detect and distinguish the effects of long-term climate change and natural variability on individual extreme events," he said.
It is hoped the study's findings will help leaders and planners around the globe protect their populations against the dangerous impacts of extreme weather, the researchers said.
"Some of these events are climate surprises," said Marty Hoerling, a report co-editor from NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.
"And we should be prepared to be better equipped to deal with such surprises," he said.
