Climate change is causing more and more extreme weather phenomena. A new analysis shows the drastic effects of climate change.
Berlin – Heat waves, floods or storms: the weather is becoming more and more extreme. The high temperatures this summer alone scare around 70 percent of people – this was the result of a representative Forsa survey in July 2022.
The extremes of summer weather are leading to wildfires and droughts across Europe. More than a quarter of people in Germany have already had health problems from the sun and heat, the survey found. A comprehensive analysis by the British newspaper The Guardian now shows that man-made climate change is increasingly leading to deadly disasters across the globe.
Climate change: over 500 events analyzed
According to The Guardian , the analysis is said to be the most comprehensive of its kind to date. For their analysis, the team, together with the world’s leading scientists in this field, used databases and studies on more than 500 extreme weather events.
The world is changing fast and it’s already damaging us – that’s the blunt summary.
Some of them can be viewed on the website of the CarbonBrief initiative. The analysis concludes “that we are already in the era of climate death and climate destruction,” as The Guardian writes.
Weather is becoming more extreme: climate change is already showing severe effects
The analysis showed that over two-thirds of the more than 500 extreme weather events studied were made possible by climate change. Without the massive impact of humans, these events would have been less extreme or even improbable.
- Extreme weather events that have become more likely or more extreme due to climate change
- Heat waves: 93% of heat waves would have been less likely or less extreme without man-made climate change.
- Droughts: This is also the case for 68% of droughts.
- Floods: Around 56% have become more extreme or more likely due to climate change.
- Source: The Guardian
Only around 9 percent of events have become less likely due to climate change, mainly onset of winter and snowstorms. The analysis also dispels the myth that the consequences of climate change are only a phenomenon of recent years. Such heat waves and droughts are already known from the 1930s.
Deaths from the weather: The consequences of climate change are so dramatic
According to the analysis, one in three of the heat-related deaths in the last thirty years were a direct result of man-made global warming. Most of these deaths are in South and Central America. In Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Peru, more than 70 percent of deaths from heart disease can be attributed to climate change, according to The Guardian .
We are seeing worst-case scenarios that were known about 10 years ago that we feared could happen several decades later, and are already happening now.
Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate commissioner who helped shape the 2015 Paris climate agreement, remains optimistic. “Together we have the capacity to make the extraordinary changes we need to correct course,” Figueres says for the future. (Lucas Maier)
