Was Storm Darragh worse because of the impact of manmade climate change?
As a journalist, when answering that question I have always said in the past that experts can’t say for sure an individual weather event is caused directly by climate change.
And that’s because there have always been storms and floods, no matter what the climate is doing.
However, scientists have been working hard to untangle all the complexities of severe weather mixed up with the changes brought on by a warming planet.
ClimaMeter, external is a website put together by a team of researchers from all over the world that examines severe weather events and then tells the rest of us in plain language what role climate change actually played in them.
They do this by comparing measurements from similar storms in the past.
For Storm Darragh, the scientists say climate change played a big role.
The heavy rain and strong winds in Storm Darragh locally WERE “strengthened by human-driven climate change”.
They can even put numbers on all this.
The researchers say storms like Darragh are 5% windier over the Atlantic coasts and up to 5mm a day (that’s up to 10%) wetter because of climate change.
The terrible impact of Storm Darragh, then, is a consequence of the choices we are making as people.
At a personal level that means everything from opposing local plans for a wind turbine or solar farm, to driving, to flying on holiday.
On a wider scale it’s councils not pushing for more cycle lanes, to the role of fossil fuel companies, to national governments not taking action to decarbonise our economies.
Storm Darragh was worse because of climate change. That’s what the science says.
We either live with the impact of future storms and floods and watch them get worse, or we choose to change.
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