There may be an explanation for the increasing reports of extreme weather.
A new study, which was published Monday in Nature Climate Change, suggests that climate change is the cause of the recent heavy rains, heat waves and harsh storms, according to TIME.
Global warming also reportedly causes 18 percent of heavy precipitation, a number that can increase to 40 percent if temperatures continue to rise. Aside from the extreme precipitation, global warming will most likely be the cause of 75 percent of moderate heat extremes, according to Washington Post.
“With every degree of warming it is the rarest and the most extreme events — and thereby the ones with typically the highest socio-economic impacts — for which the largest fraction is due to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions,” Swiss researchers Erich Fischer and Reto Knutti wrote.
“The approach here is reminiscent of medical studies, where it is not possible to attribute a single fatality from lung cancer to smoking. Instead, a comparison of the lung-cancer-related mortality rate in smokers with the rate in non-smokers may allow attribution of the excess mortality to smoking.”
The recent study was reportedly performed by running climate change models for a long period of time without any global warming in order to create a scenario in which humans had not warmed the Earth.
“We use long simulations of the world that would have been without any human influence,” explained Fischer.
Researchers then reportedly compared potential heat extremes in those models with heat extremes in models that included global warming caused by humans.
Further global warming is reportedly expected to shift the results of the recent study.
“The result has strong implications for the discussion of different mitigation targets in climate negotiations, where differences between targets are small in terms of global temperatures but large in terms of the probability of extremes,” noted Fischer and Knutti.
