By Gerard Wynn
London - Computer simulations may soon be able to show how likely it is that extreme weather events such as the floods and heatwaves that swept Europe this week were caused by climate change, scientists say.
"To say you can't blame one event on global warming isn't true," said Oxford University climate scientist Myles Allen.
"We can understand in a lot of detail what's contributing towards the risk of these events."
But is it global warming? In its second heatwave this summer temperatures in Greece soared to 45°C this week, following an earlier heatwave in June which set a new 110-year record of 46°C.
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Record temperatures this month have caused up to 500 deaths in Hungary, put 19 000 Romanians in hospital and triggered forest fires across Bulgaria.
And Britain saw this week its worst floods in 60 years, which have left about 350 000 people without running water.
But is it global warming?
Most scientists agree that, if unchecked, manmade climate change caused by emitting greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide will raise temperatures this century, and make heatwaves and heavy rainfall and storms more common.
Allen's current flood simulation goes a step further It's quite another matter to link one event to global warming, given all the chaotic factors that contribute to the weather. But some scientists think they can do just that.
To Allen it's simply a matter of calculating the probability that global warming was to blame, like quantifying the chance that smoking caused an individual case of lung cancer, or that tampering caused a loaded dice to come up six.
He heads a team which is running thousands of simulations of an individual British flood that happened in 2000, the wettest autumn recorded in 230 years.
The simulations have "borrowed" the computing time of more than 6 000 members of the public, multiplying the modelling power of the experiment.
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