How climate change influences temperatures in 1,000 cities around the world

(Inside Climate News, 29 Oct 2022) A new tool can tell you how big an impact climate change had on the temperature in those cities on any given day, plus postcards from the apocalypse, multilingual storm warnings and a plastics curriculum for school kids.

Was the temperature in your city on a given day influenced by climate change?

A new tool can answer that question for more than 1,000 cities around the world. The Climate Shift Index, developed by scientists at Climate Central, uses long-term observations and trends at locations combined with global climate models to determine whether the temperature at a given location on a given day was made more or less likely by global warming. 

The tool uses methods established in the field of attribution science to look at the frequency of temperatures in our current climate, which has warmed nearly 1.3 degrees due to human-caused carbon emissions. Scientists are able to model an alternative scenario where there is no global warming and compare how often that day’s temperature would likely occur under that scenario. The Climate Shift Index will put out a number as low as negative-5 (signaling the temperature was made 5 times less likely under climate change), as high as positive-5 (signaling the temperature was made 5 times more likely under climate change), or if climate change had no detectable influence on the temperature, a zero.

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Inside Climate News, 29 Oct 2022: How climate change influences temperatures in 1,000 cities around the world