Climatologists: Extreme Heat in Europe Is Result of Climate Change
Climatologists say the severe heatwave in Western Europe this week could not have occurred without human-caused global warming. A study shows that the probability of such events has risen dramatically over the past 50 years.
According to climatologists, the intense heatwave that has gripped Western Europe this week, with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius in some areas, is directly attributable to human-induced climate change.
A study published on Friday by the World Weather Attribution group, which includes scientists from Imperial College London and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, compared the current heatwave to the abnormally hot European summers of 1976 and 2003.
Lead author Theodore Keeping, an extreme weather researcher at Imperial College London, stated that the likelihood of such an event has increased enormously over the past 50 years. He emphasized that without climate change, such an occurrence in June would have been impossible.
In 1976, the global average temperature was only 0.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; by 2003 it had reached 0.6 degrees, and last year it stood at 1.4 degrees. Scientists agree that warming is making heatwaves more frequent and intense.
The study also found that the probability of daytime temperatures recorded this week being repeated is now ten times higher than during the anomalously hot summer of 2003, which caused 70,000 deaths. The likelihood of such high nighttime temperatures is roughly 100 times higher than 23 years ago.
Health Impacts
Researchers analyzed data from about 850 European cities and found that nearly 45% broke historical wet-bulb temperature records. The wet-bulb temperature combines dry air temperature and humidity, used to assess heat's health impact as it mimics the body's ability to cool through sweating.
Keeping warned that given the record readings, the health consequences of this heatwave are likely to be extremely severe. Many European capitals recorded their hottest three-day period since reliable data collection began in 1950.
Keeping noted that due to global warming, such extreme high temperatures during summer months can now be expected regularly in many capitals. The study also showed that the natural climate phenomenon El Niño, which is just beginning in the tropical Pacific, has no influence on the current heatwave in Europe.
