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Report: Climate change contributed to some of 2020’s worst weather

Lake Powell

By late 2021, Lake Powell had fallen to its lowest level on record. Credit: Jay Huang / Flickr

Failed monsoon rains that reignited the southwestern U.S. drought. A spring heat wave in western Europe. Intense Siberian wildfires. Scientists say human-caused climate change made these extreme weather events more likely, according to new research published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). 

Among the findings: 

  • A NOAA study that examined the U.S. Southwest drought using several different model simulations found climate change may have increased the likelihood that the monsoon-season rains would fail as they did in 2020, reigniting a multiyear drought that shows no sign of relenting. 
  • The extremely warm and wet winter over Northwest Russia in 2019 and 2020 was only possible due to climate change, another study concluded.
  • A heat wave in western Europe in May 2020 was made 40 times more likely by human caused climate change, one paper found.
  • Extreme wildfires in Siberia during 2020 were caused by weather conditions that are up to 80% more likely than a century ago as a result of global warming.

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