A new report has pinned massive heat waves in Australia in 2013 directly on greenhouse gases from manmade climate change.
According to the New York Times, the heat waves lasted for a great deal of 2013 and into 2014. For the study, five different research groups all came to the same conclusion that the heat waves could not have been so harsh without manmade climate change.
In Jan., the temperature rose as high as 111 degrees Fahrenheit, prompting tennis officials to temporarily suspend play in the Australian Open.
"When we look at the heat across the whole of Australia and the whole 12 months of 2013, we can say that this was virtually impossible without climate change," co-leader of the research David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne, told the Times.
The report also related human-caused climate change to extreme weather events such as droughts in California and rains in Colorado, though the correlation was not as strong.
"Temperature is much more continuous as opposed to precipitation, which is an on/off event," Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center, told NBC News. "If you have an on/off event, it makes the tools we have a little more difficult to use.
"The guide to the future is understanding the past."
The collaborative report was published Monday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
"Five studies all showing the same thing is a very powerful signal," report co-editor Peter Stott, climate monitoring chief for Britain's weather agency, told NBC News.
Extreme weather in other countries did not have as strong a relation to manmade greenhouse gases and climate change as in Australia.
"The results of the Australia study are rather striking," Stott told the New Zealand Herald. "They have actually shown that the chances of observing such extreme Australian temperatures in a world without anthropogenic climate change is almost impossible."
