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Previous attribution studies have measured the effects of climate change on individual Atlantic storms: for example, researchers guess He said that 38 percent of the extreme precipitation that Hurricane Harvey dropped on southeast Texas in August 2017 was due to climate change. Dr. Reed was among the researchers who confirmed that climate change also plays a role. Hurricane Florence in 2018 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

The new study is unusual in that it examines the effects of climate change not on a single hurricane, but on a full season of hurricanes, including not only the storms that swept the headlines, but also seemingly ordinary ones. Dr. Reed said the findings provide strong evidence that the anthropogenic impact is not an anomaly limited to major events like Harvey.

“If you do this objectively over a season, you’ll get similar results,” he said.

Rosimar Rios-Berrios, a research meteorologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who was not involved in the new study, said examining a full hurricane season rather than individual storms provides higher confidence that the findings accurately reflect the role of climate. change.

“There’s a lot of power in studying individual events, but ultimately one event isn’t enough because every hurricane is different,” he said.

A separate analysis published Monday found that climate change is also likely to increase the intensity of precipitation from the two severe tropical storms that ravaged southeast Africa earlier this year. However, the researchers said they were unable to quantify the precise impact of global warming on these storms due to the lack of high-quality weather data for that region.

Dr. Reed noted that the same methodology his team used could be used to measure the impact of climate change on a storm in near real time, or to show how bad storms will get if nations continue to burn fossil fuels.

The study, published Tuesday, compared the 2020 hurricane season we experienced with the hypothetical 2020 hurricane season in a world not warmed by human activities. Since the 19th century, the burning of oil, gas, and coal has increased average global temperatures by 1.1 degrees Celsius or 2 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s also possible to compare the season to the version that can occur, for example, after 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius warming — the threshold at which scientists say extremely destructive storms become significantly more likely.

Dr. “It is important not to plan for the 2020 hurricane season in the future,” Reed said. “The 2020 hurricane season plus is planning what climate change will look like in the future.”

Raymond Zhong contributing reporting.