“Climate­-driven changes are already evident over the last few decades for severe thunderstorms, for heavy precipitation and flash flood­ing, for hurricane activity, and for heatwave, drought and wild­-fire dynamics in parts of North America.”

So concludes Munich Re, a top reinsurer, in a major new study that, for the first time, links the rapid rise in North American extreme weather catastrophes to manmade climate change.

At the same time non-climatic events (earthquakes, volcanos, tsunamis) have hardly changed, as the figure shows.

Prof. Peter Höppe, who heads Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research unit, said:

“In all likelihood, we have to regard this finding as an initial climate-change footprint in our US loss data from the last four decades. Previously, there had not been such a strong chain of evidence. If the first effects of climate change are already perceptible, all alerts and measures against it have become even more pressing.”

The 274-page study, “Severe weather in North America” draws on “the most comprehensive natural catastrophe database worldwide,” though my favorite part is four words at the bottom of the back jacket:

Precisely.

This study builds on a September 2010 analysis by Munich Re, “Large number of weather ...

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