Extreme U.S. and U.K. Winters Linked to Greenhouse Gases

The severe snowstorms that battered much of the U.S. and the U.K.’s wettest winter in almost 250 years were at least partially caused by rising greenhouse-gas emissions, a University of Oxford researcher said.

Rising sea temperatures in the tropical Western Pacific also exacerbated last year’s 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.