The heavy rains and floods that killed at least 220 people in Belgium and Germany this summer were made more likely and more intense by climate change.
That is the conclusion of a rapid attribution report, put together in just over a month, by a group of 39 scientists collaborating under the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative. Climate change made the floods between 1.2 and nine times more likely to happen, while it increased the intensity of the event by between 3% and 19%.
"The possibility indicated by these ranges is that these things are becoming more frequent,” said Maarten van Aalst, director of the international Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center and a professor at University of Twente in the Netherlands. "We don’t know how rapidly and we don’t know in which side of the range we are, but it’s a possibility we now need to take into account.”
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