Extreme heat waves, devastating droughts, and resulting storms are exemplary effects of the climate change caused by humans. According to a 2014 report from the United Nations, 75% of these heat events can be attributed to some sort of human activity.
The United Nations report claims that there is only a 5% chance that the events of global warming seen in the last 65 years happened due to natural causes, and climate change caused by human doings is a more likely to be accurate story. These human doings could include everything from every day travel to work to using fossil fuels, to pollution, and more serious things that happen all over the world every day.
Climate Change Caused By Events of the 20th Century
Researchers participating in the study compared information that dates back to the start of the 20th century. Using data collected from various satellites technology from the beginning of this type of technology. Using this data, researchers claim that not only does 75% of the extreme heat instances in the world relate to human activity such as travel by plane or burning coal, but so does around 18% of extremes in precipitation. These include things like extremes in temperature that resulted in disasters such as flooding, lightning strikes, power blackouts, and more. Climate changed caused by humans results not only in a loss of money, but a loss of human lives as well.
The study says that things like heat waves and severe storms that are due to climate change are connected to the actions of humans, and are far from rare in the past 100 years and global warming is the cause. The report shows that temperatures on Earth have risen about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times.
Extremes Judged by Frequency, Severity
The extremes in weather and temperature that the researchers counted were those weather events that happened at least once in 1,000 days. This varied in how they were counted since what is considered as an extremely hot day in Arizona, for example, is not the same thing as an extremely hot day in Vermont. However, they still hold firm to their theory that 75% of these events are climate change cause that can be connected to modern human activities.
The study claims that extreme heat days shouldn’t happen as often as they are. Something that may have used to only happen about once in 1,000 day is now–due to global warming–occurring about four times in the same period, with three out of those four times due to climate change caused by human travel, fossil fuels, etc. According to the study, if the world doesn’t do something to stop climate change cause that can be attributed to the way humans operate on a day to day basis–if carbon emissions and other activities continue unabated, by the middle of the 21st century 93% of extreme heat events will have been caused by human activity.
New York City’s Wall Street is shown in this visual postcard – NYC is one of the most polluted cities in the U.S. and an example of how climate change caused by humans plays out in innocent day-to-day life:
https://youtu.be/D1xDIJ59dJ4
