LondonCNN —
An analysis of Pakistan’s devastating floods has found “fingerprints” of the human-made climate crisis on the disaster, which killed more than 1,500 people and destroyed so much land and infrastructure it has plunged the South Asian nation into crisis.
The analysis, published Thursday by the World Weather Attribution initiative, was unable to quantify exactly how much climate change contributed to the floods — which were caused by several months of heavy rainfall in the region — but some of its models found that the crisis may have increased the intensity of rainfall by up to 50%, when looking specifically at a five-day downpour that hit the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan hard.
The analysis also found that the floods were likely a 1-in-100-year event, meaning that there is a 1% chance of similarly heavy rainfall each year.
If the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures — as it is on course to — short rain bursts like those seen in the five-day period will likely become even more intense. The Earth is already around 1.2 degrees warmer than it was before industrialization.
Comments