A new study linked the rising rate of extreme weather events to manmade climate change.
According to the Guardian, the researchers found severe storms, droughts and other extreme weather events are occurring about once a year on average, sometimes more commonly. They suggested one such weather event in every five is a direct result of a rising global temperature.
The new study is published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
"This much hyped global warming slowdown is just a distraction to the task at hand," study lead author Matthew England, Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, said in a press release. "This shows that the slowdown in global warming has no bearing on long-term projections - it is simply due to decadal variability. Greenhouse gases will eventually overwhelm this natural fluctuation."
One complication in the research has been the subjectivity of extreme weather events pertaining to a given region's average climate.
"What has been lacking up to now is a robust calculation of how much more likely extreme temperatures and rainfall have become worldwide," Peter Stott, a scientist at the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre, told the Guardian.
Using England as an example, Reuters noted, the researchers said "moderate extreme" temperatures were previously expected every 1,000 days. Now, such weather can be expected as often as once every 200 days.
"In the UK, for a one-in-a-thousand day, which is one in three years, we would probably be well adapted to that," Stott said. "But I think we've shown that we are vulnerable to more extreme situations - those that happen once in a century. For example the wet winter we had in 2013-14. Or indeed the heatwave we had back in 2003 when many vulnerable, eldery people died. But in the tropics, in parts of the developing world, they are extremely vulnerable to one-in-three year events."
