A double whammy of heat and aridity is now more likely to strike regions around the globe.

Global warming has doubled the probability that in any given year, some regions of our planet will be both hotter and dryer than they’ve been on average.

Most research into future heat waves, droughts and other extreme events investigates the likelihood of only one such event at a time. Ali Sarhadi at Stanford University in California and his colleagues wanted to determine the odds of multiple extreme events occurring at once.

They compared global temperatures stretching back to 1931 with conditions predicted by climate models. The team found that the odds of a particular region being both hotter and drier in one year than the historical average are much higher today than they were before.

Worryingly, the chances are also higher that multiple important agricultural regions will suffer exceptional heat and drought at the same time. Compared with data from the period before 1980, the odds have more than tripled that China and India will experience both extremes in the same year.

The risk of these events occurring simultaneously will fall if greenhouse-gas emission cuts, such as those outlined in the recent Paris climate accord, are implemented.