The severe snowstorms that battered much of the U.S. and the U.K.\u2019s wettest winter in almost 250 years were at least partially caused by rising greenhouse-gas emissions, a University of Oxford researcher said.<\/p>\n
Rising sea temperatures in the tropical Western Pacific also exacerbated last year\u2019s typhoon season including Haiyan, which killed more than 6,000 people in the Philippines, and heat waves in Australia, said Tim Palmer, a professor of climate physics whose findings appear today in the journal Science.<\/p>\n
As the climate warms, more heat is trapped in the ocean, Palmer said. This leads to additional moisture in the region\u2019s air ending up in the jet stream, which moves from west to east and dumped more snow and rain on North America and Europe.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe sea temperatures in that crucial region of the west Pacific, which are some of the warmest ocean temperatures anywhere in the world, have reached these all-time record warmings through an additional effect, which is man-made climate change,\u201d Palmer said in a telephone interview. \u201cThe water\u2019s already warm there, and it\u2019s just taken it over the brink to create conditions last winter and into this spring that were unprecedented.\u201d<\/p>\n
Palmer\u2019s research builds on work that he began almost 30 years ago that examined how climate trends affected weather patterns in the Eastern U.S.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are various links in a long chain, and part of my message is that climate is a complex system,\u201d Palmer said. \u201cInteraction between natural climate variability and man-made climate change are coming together in a perfect storm.\u201d<\/p>\n