How Climate Change Exacerbates Natural Disasters

JAKARTA - Climate change is increasingly becoming a serious threat to human life on planet earth. A group of global climate scientists reveals how climate change is affecting the recent series of extreme weather.

Forest fires in the United States (US), heavy rains in Africa, to a heat wave that threatens California to Siberia are some of the examples raised. And humans have a share in these disasters.

"We are seeing some signals emerging that would be almost impossible without human-caused climate change," said Sonia Seneviratne, one of the climate scientists at Swiss University ETH Zurich.

Sonia added that climate change could exacerbate natural disasters, including storms or heat waves. Human behavior continues to exacerbate the situation with the contribution of large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists have also conducted simulations to understand the relationship between extreme weather and climate change. They take into account weather observations made over the last few decades to get a broader picture.

As a result, climate change has a major influence on extreme weather which causes various disasters, such as floods, fires, and so on. "What people say about extreme weather that cannot be linked to climate change is not true," said Sonia.

According to scientists, the increasing frequency and intensity of heat waves around the world is closely related to climate change. They gave examples of rising temperatures in Siberia and massive wildfires in Russia as a result of the ferocity of climate change.

The relationship between climate change and heat wave is corroborated by the facts from 2018. In that year, the heat wave simultaneously hit Europe, Japan and North America.

The study also found that the possibility of these events occurring simultaneously would not have been possible if there had been no increase in emissions from existing industries in the world. "In terms of heat waves, we saw that climate change was an absolute game changer," said another climate scientist at the University of Oxford, Friederike Otto.

Not only Otto, a climate scientist from the University of California, Daniel Swain reveals the same thing. However, he joked that climate change did not really destabilize historical weather patterns. “In many cases, it (climate change) reinforces the presence of extreme weather.

Not only heat waves, scientists also believe that natural disasters such as storms, rain and floods are closely related to climate change. Take for example the flood disaster. Researchers from the University of Bristol, England have published research which found that climate change could make rainstorms five times more likely in the Caribbean.

This disaster is very possible because the emissions are increasing day by day. Not only that, but heat waves that raise ocean temperatures have a big chance of contributing to extreme rainfall and flooding in China. Evidently, this summer alone, China has experienced the worst floods in the last three decades.

"Extreme rainfall events will become more extreme. It's something we feel, ”said Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

In Africa, too. Recently countries in Africa have experienced heavy rains and severe flooding. It is noted that tens of thousands of people have been left homeless due to flooding from the Nile River in Sudan. Meanwhile, in another country, Senegal, excessive rainfall has occurred and has become an unusual sight in the region.

“There is a lot of growing evidence telling us that human-caused climate change is affecting extreme events. Very rarely does this happen, ”concluded James Kossin, climate scientist in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.