Extreme rainfall more likely with climate change

With climate change, leading scientists warn that lethal floods are now up to nine times more likely.

Lethal floods refer to those caused by extreme rainfall, like the ones which swept parts of Germany and Belgium last month.

Extreme weather will become more frequent and intense as climate change warms the planet, according to new research by the World Weather Attribution initiative.

Meteorologists found that such downpours are now 3 to 19 percent heavier in the region, compared to when the climate was 1.2 C cooler 150 years ago.

The findings back up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark report this month, which said there is unequivocal evidence that human activities were warming the planet, and that this is making extreme weather events increasingly more likely and more severe.

Devastating floods have struck Western Europe and China this year, while extreme heat waves have caused havoc in Russia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Canada and the United States.

More than 200 people were killed, homes destroyed, and businesses and infrastructure wrecked as record-breaking rainfall caused devastation in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg between July 12 and 15.

"We will definitely get more of this in a warming climate," said Friederike Otto, the group's co-leader and associate director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.

The WWA initiative used attribution science, a method which uses meteorological measurements and computer simulations to find out whether climate change made extreme weather more likely.

"These floods have shown us that even developed countries are not safe from the severe impacts of extreme weather that we have seen and that are known to get worse with climate change," said Otto, as quoted in a Financial Times report.

Urgent global challenge

"This is an urgent global challenge and we need to step up to it. The science is clear and has been for years."

In a Sky News report, climate researcher Sjoukje Philip from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said they combined the knowledge of specialists from several fields of study to understand the influence of climate change on the severe flooding last month, and to make clear what they can and cannot analyze in this event.

"It is difficult to analyze the climate change influence on heavy rainfall at very local levels, but we were able to show that in Western Europe, greenhouse gas emissions have made events like these more likely," Philip said.

Last month, the WWA group of scientists drew attention with the pronouncement that the recent record-breaking heat wave in North America would have been "virtually impossible" without human-caused climate change.

Maarten van Aalst, WWA scientist from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, said as temperatures rise further, the world will be exposed to increasing extreme rainfall and flooding.

"The huge human and economic costs of these floods are a stark reminder that countries around the world need to prepare for more extreme weather events, and that we urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to avoid such risks from getting even further out of hand," said van Aalst in an interview with The Guardian.