A warming planet may cause lightning strikes to increase by as much as 50 percent, according to new research.

Climate change is expected to lead to rising sea levels and increasingly violent storms, and the research says that you can add more electrical discharges to the ground from clouds as another negative effect, according to Business Standard.

David Romps, climate scientist at University of California, Berkeley, said that climate change will cause not only a greater frequency of storms, but also more violent storms. Researchers studied predictions of precipitation and cloud buoyancy in 11 climate models, leading to the conclusion that they will generate more lightning in a warmer climate. The research was published in the journal Science.

Romps pointed to the fact that lightning is caused by charge separation within clouds, which is heightened by more water vapor and heavy ice particles in the atmosphere. Global warming will cause more water to turn into vapor, providing fuel for more intense lightning storms.

The precipitation will increase convection in the atmosphere, which generates lightning. Scientists measure how convective an atmosphere is by determining the total amount of water that falls to the ground.

The increase in lightning strikes will have real consequences for humans, as already nearly a thousand people every year get struck by lightning, with many of them dying.

Another consequence is a greater incidence of wildfires — half of all wildfires are struck by lightning. They are also the hardest to fight since they often happen in remote areas.

More lightning strikes would also the chemistry of the atmosphere, as it would generate more nitrogen oxides.

Researchers operated on an assumption that global temperatures would rise by about 7 degrees Fahrenheit. Romps said the increase in lightning is “an example of a fairly large change that you can get from what sounds like a relatively small global temperature increase,” according to the New York Times.

It is not a groundbreaking discovery, as most know that global warming will cause a release of more energy in the atmosphere, but this is the first attempt to put more precise figures on lightning estimates. The researchers found they could do this using a simple equation using data for precipitation and storm energy, which works over large areas.

With that in mind, researchers could look at computerized forecasts in the future and make more accurate estimates for lightning strikes, where they came up with the whopping 50 percent figure. That figure is the most likely scenario, although a range calls for anywhere from 14 percent to 90 percent depending on the actual rate of warming.