U.S. report links climate change to last year's heat waves

Climate change very likely worsened heat waves that scorched East Asia, East Africa and Europe in 2015, helping make it the warmest year on record, a U.S. report said Thursday.

"We're seeing mounting evidence that climate change is making heat waves more extreme in many regions around the world," lead editor Stephanie Herring, a scientist with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Centers for Environmental Information, said in a statement.

"As we get better at distinguishing the influence of climate change from natural variability, the local significance and impacts of this global phenomenon are becoming clearer."

According to the report, called the fifth edition of Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective, strong evidence for human-influenced climate change was identified for ten extreme heat events, including heat waves in Europe, India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Japan, and Australia.

Such influence was also found for other temperature-related events, including diminished snowpack in the Cascades of North America, record-low Arctic sea ice extent in March and the extraordinary extent and duration of Alaska wildfires.

Numerous other events of 2015 were also made more extreme by climate change, said the report, which included 25 peer-reviewed research papers that examine episodes of extreme weather over five continents and two oceans last year.

For example, the probability of the so-called "sunny day" tidal flooding events in the U.S. Miami area has risen 500 percent since 1994, according to one study.

Climate change also likely contributed to the record high intensity of west North Pacific typhoons and the record amount of winter sunshine in the United Kingdom.

But researchers found no evidence of an overall climate change signal in the late arrival of the Nigerian spring rainy season or in the extreme daily rainfall totals that inundated Chennai, India in December.

Likewise, there was no evidence that the extreme cold winter conditions over the northeast United States and Canada in 2015 were made more likely by climate change.

The report, which featured the research of 116 scientists from 18 countries, was published in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Enditem