Add Dry Riverbeds and Overflowing Banks to the List of Things Made Worse by Climate Change
A new report in Science is another leap forward in researchers’ ability to attribute individual anomalies to greenhouse gases.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Climate scientists have made dramatic strides over the last two-and-a-half decades in their ability to attribute specific, observable climatic changes to the release of heat-trapping gases by humans. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change definitively linked global warming to a “discernible human influence on the global climate,” and yet in the last few years, scientists have become able to pinpoint the contribution of the greenhouse effect to individual heat waves and fire disasters.
Today, a new study in the journal Science carves out yet another advance in the field of climate change attribution: the ability to blame humanity for observed changes in the world’s rivers.