Climate change exacerbated 2012 weather events

A study edited by scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and England’s Met Office finds that climate change made weather events worse in 2012. The full study is published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The findings were produced by 18 different research teams. Half of the year’s most extreme weather events, researchers found, had climate change as a factor. There is “compelling evidence,” the reports notes, that climate change contributed to the events.

Among those extreme events were 100-degree fahrenheit days in the United States, a record loss of ice in the Arctic and Hurricane Sandy. But wet weather patterns in Britain were not linked to climate change, a notion the report dispels, and neither were droughts in the U.S., Kenya or Somalia.

Image: Superstorm Sandy after making landfall on the U.S. East Coast (Credit: NASA)