Is climate change to blame for the Pakistan floods? Here’s what we know.
This summer, four times more rain than normal fell on southern Pakistan, causing widespread flooding that left a third of the country underwater. The scale is hard to wrap your head around: The deluge has affected 33 million people — 15 percent of Pakistan’s population — and has turned villages into isolated islands. The death toll stands at 1,500.
It sounds like just the kind of unfathomable disaster that wouldn’t have happened without climate change. According to new research released on Thursday, the hotter planet played a role by making the flooding worse — though it wasn’t the only factor.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group found that climate change likely intensified the overall rain by 50 percent this summer. At the monsoon’s worst — the heaviest five-day period in the southern provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh — …