WASHINGTON — Scien- tists looking at 16 cases of wild weather around the world last year see the fingerprints of man-made global warming on more than half of them.
Researchers found that climate change increased the odds of nine extremes: heat waves in Australia, Europe, China, Japan and Korea; intense rain in parts of the United States and India; and severe droughts in California and New Zealand. The California drought, though, comes with an asterisk.
Scientists couldn’t find a global warming link to an early South Dakota blizzard, freak storms in Germany and the Pyrenees, heavy rain in Colorado and southern and central Europe, and a cold British spring.
Organized by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, researchers published 22 studies Monday on 2013 climate extremes in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
“It’s not ever a single factor that is responsible for the extremes that we see,” said NOAA National Climatic Data Center director Tom Karl said.
