Global warming has made the heavy rains behind South Africa’s devastating floods last month twice as likely compared to a scenario without the planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, scientists said on Friday. .
Flash floods in the east coast city of Durban killed 435 people, left tens of thousands homeless and caused 10 billion rand ($621.73 million) in damage to roads, power lines, water pipes and one of the Africa’s busiest ports.
The World Weather Attribution group analyzed weather data and digital simulations to compare today’s weather with that before the industrial revolution in the late 1800s, when the world was about 1.2°C cooler.
“The results showed that an episode of extreme rainfall like this now can happen about once every 20 years,” said a report on the study.
“Without human-caused global warming, this event would only happen once every 40 years, so it’s become about twice as common as a result of greenhouse gas emissions.”
The report adds that when extreme rainfall occurs, it can be expected to be 4-8% more intense than if no human-induced global warming had occurred.
Attributing specific weather events to climate change is a context that deals with probabilities, never with certainties. But co-author Friederike Otto of Imperial College London said the study looked at data from the wider region, not just Durban.
“Looking at the larger region is actually a very meaningful way to assess the impact of climate change. [O estudo] means that, in any given year, there is a 5% probability of such an event occurring,” she said in a press conference, versus 2.5% in the absence of global warming.
The southeastern coast of Africa is at the forefront of maritime weather systems that climate change is making more inhospitable, scientists say. South Africa’s tropical northern neighbor Mozambique has suffered several cyclones and floods over the past decade, including one in April that killed more than 50 people.
“The patterns we see in southern Africa are consistent with what we’re seeing in other parts of the world,” Jasper Knight, a geoscientist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg who was not involved in the study, told Reuters.
“This confirms that climate change is real, it’s happening now and it’s affecting the most vulnerable.”
(Edited by Mark Heinrich)
Source: CNN Brasil
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