Climate crisis made summer drought 20 times more likely, scientists find

 

Where I live, it's a fall drought. Had too much rain this summer, now none for several weeks.

 

 The droughts and flood which have been occurring around the globe have reduced crop yields and contributed to inflation, which the news media doesn't mention when talking about inflation.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/05/climate-crisis-made-summer-drought-20-times-more-likely-scientists-find 

Damian Carrington Environment editor
@dpcarrington
Wed 5 Oct 2022 17.00 EDT

The climate crisis made the record drought across the northern hemisphere this summer at least 20 times more likely, scientists have calculated. Without human-caused global heating, the event would have been expected only once every four centuries.

The drought hit crop production and power supplies, exacerbating the food and energy crises already sparked by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Droughts will become even more severe and more frequent unless the burning of fossil fuels is phased out, the researchers warned.

The dry conditions, assessed using data on soil moisture, largely resulted from the heatwaves that struck across North America, Europe and Asia, with lower rainfall relatively less important. The scientists said a summer as hot as that of 2022 would have been “virtually impossible” without global heating and in Europe alone there were 24,000 heat-related fatalities.

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The dry conditions caused widespread water shortages and wildfires, with a record number of blazes in Europe, the first national drought alert in China and more than half of the US being declared in drought. In the UK, temperatures hit 40C for the first time on record, shocking scientists, and hosepipe bans are still in place across much of the country.

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Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London, UK, and also part of the team, said: “In Europe, drought conditions led to reduced harvests. This was particularly worrying as it followed a climate change-fuelled heatwave in [India and Pakistan] that also destroyed crops, and happened at a time when global food prices were already extremely high due to the war in Ukraine.”

The scientists had already found that the deadly South Asian heatwave was made 30 times more likely by the climate crisis and that the intense rainfall, which caused devastating floods across Pakistan, was made 50% worse by global heating. 

-----The scientists found the record northern hemisphere drought of 2022 would be expected once every 20 years in today’s climate but only every 400 years without climate change. The drought in western and central Europe was made at least three to four times more likely by global heating. But they said this does not mean that climate change has had less influence in Europe as the fingerprint of climate change is harder to discern in smaller regions.

The analysis is complex and carries uncertainties, but the researchers said the estimates in the study are conservative, with the real influence of human activities likely even higher.

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 “We’re also seeing the impacts compounding and cascading across regions and sectors,” he said. For example, the drought cut hydropower production, as well as power from nuclear and coal plants, due to lack of cooling water. “That compounded a situation where electricity prices were already under stress, due to the Russia-Ukraine war and when we needed lots of electricity for air conditioning all across Europe to deal with the high heat.”

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