Washington-Sana
A recent study revealed that extreme weather phenomena, ranging from heat waves to unusually heavy rains, caused widespread weather fluctuations around the world this year, killing thousands of people and displacing millions.
Reuters quoted a study in the journal "Environmental Research" published by climate scientists today that climate change has played a role in the occurrence of individual weather phenomena during the past twenty years, warning of how global warming is changing the world now.
The study showed that monsoon rains have caused catastrophic flooding in Bangladesh over the past three months, and heat waves have swept parts of South Asia and Europe, while at the same time prolonged drought has left millions of people on the brink of famine in East Africa.
Luke Harrington, a climate scientist at Victoria University of Wellington, who co-authored the study, said: "For heat waves and heavy rains, we find that we have a much greater understanding of how the intensity of these phenomena is altered by climate change, but scientists do not yet fully understand how climate change affects them." on forest fires and drought.
According to the study, episodes of heavy rainfall have become more common and severe in general, and the reason for this is that the hotter air carries more moisture, and thus the clouds become heavier before they start to rain, pointing out that the effect still varies from one region to another with insufficient precipitation. rain in some areas.
The study indicated that some areas suffered from persistent drought, as rising temperatures in the western United States, for example, led to faster melting of ice and evaporation.
According to the study, weather conditions such as heat waves and drought increase the intensity of forest fires. The study also pointed out that according to a global scale, the frequency of storms did not increase, but hurricanes became more common in the Central Pacific and North Atlantic regions and less common in the Bay of Bengal and the Northwest Pacific region. In the southern Indian Ocean, there is also evidence that tropical storms are becoming more intense, even stopping on land, where they can drop more rain in one area.
For their research, the scientists relied on hundreds of attribution studies, or research aimed at calculating how climate change has affected an extreme phenomenon using simulations and weather observations.
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