A new study in Nature Climate Change reports that climate change caused by humans has significantly increased the odds of abnormal heat events. The study, which focused on “moderate” extreme heat incidents, found that such incidents were four times likelier to occur in our current global warming-affected climate than they would in a climate free of human intervention. Extreme precipitation events were also found to be 18 percent more likely due to global warming.

“Moderate” heat extremes were defined by the study as being events that were likely to occur once every 1,000 days normally. The study’s lead author, Eric Fischer, predicted that more extreme weather events would be affected even more dramatically by global warming than moderate extremes. “A general tendency we see is, if we pick even higher thresholds, if you look at 1 in 10,000 days, 1-in-30-year events, which we can do at least for hot extremes, the increase becomes even bigger,” said Fischer.

The study reached its conclusions by running two separate sets of long-term climate change computer models. One simulated what the climate would be like without the intervention of humans, and the other included global warming in its calculations.

The simulations found that as the climate warms further, the increased risk of extreme heat events will become more pronounced. If warming is capped at two degrees Celsius, as many industrialized nations like the United States wish, extreme heat events will be about five times likelier than they are now. The study authors stress that if global warming is halted even slightly before this threshold, at 1.5 C, the effect on weather patterns will be far less dramatic.

This study joins several other papers that all suggest that human activity is making extreme heat events more frequent. The heat waves in 2003 in Europe, 2010 in Russia, and 2013 in Australia were all made more likely by global warming according to recent studies.