COULD you be sued for your contribution to climate change? Countries and individual companies face that possibility now that there’s a way to quantify how global warming increases the risks of freak weather.
Myles Allen from the University of Oxford and colleagues modelled the relative frequency of heatwaves in today’s greenhouse world compared with their frequency in an uncontaminated environment. While they say it is impossible to blame any individual heatwave on global warming, their simulations suggest that human activity has at least doubled, and more likely quadrupled, the risk of a severe heatwave like the one that killed thousands…
