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According to Carbon Brief, six extreme weather events in Ireland were made more likely or more severe by climate change, including 2022’s Storm Eunice.
The latest iteration of a Carbon Brief analysis has found that 74pc of extreme weather events were made more likely or more severe because of climate change – including “multiple cases” where extreme events were “virtually impossible” without human influence on global temperatures.
The UK-based climate news organisation analysed nearly 750 extreme weather events and trends covered in more than 600 studies.
According to the study, six weather events in Ireland were more likely or more severe due to climate change. This includes the 2023-2024 winter storm rainfall – made 20pc worse by human-cased climate change, the extreme rainfall in October 2023 and Storm Eunice in 2022 which took one person’s life in Ireland and killed several more people in Europe.
While in the US, Carbon Brief data showed that climate change increased the severity or likelihood of 72 extreme weather events, including hurricane Katrina in 2004 and hurricane Sandy in 2012. More recently, hurricane Beryl and the extreme heat in Florida and Mexico has also been made worse due to climate change.
Worldwide, the most studied extremes are related to heat (28pc), followed by rainfall and flooding (24pc), which together account for more than half of the events and trends in the Carbon Brief data. This is followed by drought (14pc) and storms and cold, and snow and ice at 8pc.
Around 9pc of the events and trends – mainly consisting of blizzards and cold extremes – in the study were made less likely or severe by climate change, the UK-based organisation said.
The concentration of academics and institutions in the Global North along with a lack of weather data and monitoring systems in the Global South led to the Carbon Brief data, which is translated into an annual map, being dominated by extremes in Europe – even though extreme weather events have taken a disastrous turn in parts of Asia and Africa.
Carbon Brief noted that “relatively few of the studied extremes,” were in central and southern Asia, Oceania, northern Africa and western Asia.
Climate change worsening the dengue burden
Climate change is a big factor driving a global surge in the mosquito-borne disease, dengue, researchers from Stanford and Harvard universities found. Climate change accounts for 19pc of the current dengue burden.
However, it is possible that climate change could spike the dengue burden by 40-60pc by 2050 — and by as much as 150-200pc in some areas, the researchers suggested.
“We looked at data on dengue incidence and climate variation across 21 countries in Asia and the Americas and found that there is a clear and direct relationship between rising temperatures and rising infections,” said Dr Erin Mordecai, an infectious disease ecologist at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment and the study’s senior author.
“It’s evidence that climate change already has become a significant threat to human health and, for dengue in particular, our data suggests the impact could get much worse.”
Mordecai’s team looked at 21 dengue-endemic countries, including Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Vietnam and Cambodia, which regularly collect data on infection rates, and found that dengue-endemic areas that are just now entering 20 degrees Celsius to 29 degrees Celsius – temperatures where mosquitoes that carry dengue progressively churn out more and more virus – which include parts of Peru, Mexico, Bolivia and Brazil — could face the biggest future risks, with infections over the next few decades rising by 150-200pc.
Controlling global warning by reducing emissions would help moderate the impact of climate on dengue infections, the study found.
The analysis showed that with sharp cuts in emissions, areas now on track to experience a 60pc increase would instead see about a 40pc rise in dengue infections between now and 2050.
However, with global climate models predicting that temperatures will continue to increase even with large reductions in emissions, the researchers found that 17 of the 21 countries studied would still see climate-driven increases in dengue even under the most optimistic scenarios for carbon cuts.
2024 is on track to become the warmest year on record, according to data from the EU’s Copernicus satellite. The global average temperature this past year was 0.74 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average and a staggering 1.62 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
The World Meteorological Organization said in a report earlier this year: “The science is clear – greenhouse gas emissions are rising, global temperatures are shattering records and extreme weather is wreaking havoc with our lives and our economies.”
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