O of Climate Change leads to dangerous waves heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere this week and will continue to cause dangerous weather for decades to come, according to research.
“This is a global heatwave that we are experiencing right now. This puts heat in the context of our decisions,” said Cristiana Figueres, former head of the UN climate agency.
How climate change is causing heat
As the continued burning of fossil fuels releases more carbon emissions into the atmosphere, the air can trap more heat from the sun – causing average global temperatures to rise over time.
The global average temperature has already risen by nearly 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial revolution, when Western countries began burning coal and other fossil fuels. This higher baseline means that climate change is already making all heat waves hotter than they would be without global warming. They are also becoming more frequent overall – and more dangerous.
Each major heat wave “has become significantly more dangerous and hotter of what would be the result of human-induced climate change,” UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain told reporters earlier this month. “At this point, this is almost a trivial claim because there is so much evidence to support it.”
How important is climate change?
In addition to global warming, there are and other factors and conditions which can affect hot flashes. Weather systems such as El Niño or La Niña can have a major impact, along with regional air circulation patterns.
Land cover may also play a role, with dark surfaces and built environments tending to heat up more than white reflective surfaces or natural systems such as forests or wetlands.
To find out exactly how much climate change has affected a particular heat wave, scientists carry out “performance studies”. They have conducted hundreds of such studies over the past decade, running computer simulations to compare current weather systems with how they might have behaved if humans had not changed the atmosphere’s chemistry over the past century.
For example, scientists at World Weather Attribution found that the dangerous heat wave that hit South Asia in April was 45 times more likely to have happened thanks to climate change. During this heat wave, thermometers in the city of Kolkata in northeast India reached 46 C (115 F) – 10 degrees above the seasonal average.
What can we expect?
Even if all carbon dioxide emissions stopped today, the world has already emitted enough to ensure that climate change will continue to increase temperatures for decades.
The world needs to halve emissions from 1995 levels by 2030 – and reach net-zero emissions by 2050 – to have the opportunity to keep the average global temperature increase at around 1.5 C (2.7 F ) above the pre-industrial average, according to scientists. at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The fact that millions of people “in the United States are experiencing unprecedented heatwaves is indicative that we have not yet faced the worst of climate change,” Figueres told Reuters on Thursday.
With information from Reuters