Study uses recorded temperature data, rather than prediction models, to assert climate change’s impact on recent weather.

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Unusually hot summers, and the destructive droughts and wildfires that follow, are the product of climate change, according to a study of recorded global temperature data by a prominent Nasa scientist.

The study uses recorded temperature data, rather than prediction models, to assert that climate change is responsible for recent extreme weather events including last year’s droughts in Texas and Oklahoma, the Russian heat wave in 2010 and the European heat wave in 2003.

The author of the study and head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dr James Hansen, said: “We now know that the chances these extreme weather events would have happened naturally – without climate change – is negligible.”

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