WASHINGTON — Scientists looking at 16 cases of wild weather around the world last year see the fingerprints of human-caused global warming on more than half of them.
Researchers found that climate change increased the odds of nine extremes: Heat waves in Australia, Europe, China, Japan, and Korea, intense rain in parts of the United States and India, and severe droughts in California and New Zealand. The California drought, though, comes with an asterisk.
Scientists couldn’t find a global warming link to an early South Dakota blizzard, freak storms in Germany and the Pyrenees, heavy rain in Colorado, southern and central Europe, and a cold British spring.
Organized by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, researchers published 22 studies on 2013 climate extremes in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
‘‘It’s not ever a single factor responsible for the extremes that we see,’’ said Tom Karl, director of the NOAA National Climatic Data Center. ‘‘Natural variability is always part of any extreme climate event.’’
For years, scientists said they could not attribute single weather events — like a drought, heat wave or storm — to human-caused global warming. But with better computer models and new research, in some cases scientists can see how the odds of events increase or not because of climate change. Other researchers question the usefulness of focusing on single events.
The editors of the 108-page compilation of studies wrote that people and animals tend to be more affected by extreme weather than changes in averages, so they pay attention to it. The public often connects extreme events to climate change, sometimes wrongly, so scientific analysis like this ‘‘can help inform the public’s understanding of our changing environment.’’
The report seeks to find how much, or how, human-caused warming has influenced weather, said NOAA meteorologist Martin Hoerling, an editor of the report.
The influence on Australia’s hottest year in more than a century is glaring, the report’s editors said. ‘‘It’s almost impossible’’ to explain Australia’s hot 2013 without climate change, said Peter Stott of the United Kingdom’s meteorology office, another editor.
However, the editors of the journal’s special edition said that with the studies in Monday’s report that it is unclear whether a global warming connection can be pinned to California’s drought.