A new study concludes that when placed into a long-term context recent drought events in Europe are within the range of natural variability and are not unprecedented over the last millennium.
The 2003 European heatwave and drought has a special place in the history of the study of our changing climate. It was the first event that scientists attributed to human-induced climate change. A paper by Stott et al published in Nature concluded, “Human influence has at least doubled the risk of a regional heatwave like the European Summer of 2003.” This was later strengthened and the event was said to be directly caused by humans.
Alongside the increasing attribution of such events to human-influence has been the assertion that the incidence of droughts is on the rise, along with their human toll. Looking back at 2004 Peter Stott of the UK Met Office has written that at that time “heatwaves, floods and droughts were on the rise.
This was a view that was at odds with the science, in 2004 and for many years afterwards. In 2013 the IPCC AR5 report said there was low confidence that droughts had increased. But by AR6, just eight years later, the situation had changed. AR6 said that there was now medium confidence that droughts had increased, but then it goes on to say, “there is low confidence that human influence has affected meteorological droughts in most regions but medium confidence that they have contributed to the severity of some specific events. It add that there is medium confidence that human-induced climate change has contributed to increasing trends in the probability or intensity of recent agricultural and ecological droughts.” So, AR6 has a set of contradictory stances.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/recent-european-droughts-are-not-unprecedented-new-study-finds/
