You can see the impact of climate change on weather near you.
If you’ve lived through a major hurricane, wildfire, or drought, you might wonder: did climate change have anything to do with this? Now you may be able to get the answer from an online, interactive map.
Scientists have studied the influence of human-caused global warming on more than 140 weather events around the world. Roz Pidcock decided to make it easy to follow this rapidly growing body of research.
So as a deputy editor at the UK-based website Carbon Brief, she created a map that shows where each peer-reviewed study was focused, the type of weather event, and if researchers found it was influenced by global warming.
Pidcock: “What that evidence is showing at the moment, is that something like 63 percent of the extreme weather events that have been studied to date have shown that climate change has made those more severe or more likely.”
Empty areas of the map also illustrate that more research is needed.
Pidcock: “There are huge areas of the world that haven’t yet been studied.”
But as the map shows, the growing body of research indicates that climate change is already making extreme weather more likely and more severe.
Reporting credit: Daisy Simmons/ChavoBart Digital Media.