London:
Climate change due to human activity has increased the likelihood of Britain’s record-shattering heat wave this month at least 10 times, according to research released Friday.
Eastern England registered a record temperature of 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.5 degrees Farenheit) and the hot spell led to fires that destroyed dozens of homes in London.
In all, at least 34 sites in Britain registered record highs on July 20, when the heat wave peaked over Western Europe.
An international team of researchers has modeled how likely such an extremely warm weather event would have been before the Industrial Age began in the mid-19th century.
They then compared this probability to that of a heat wave occurring in the current climate — that is, with the planet, on average, nearly 1.2°C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times.
They focused on maximum temperatures in Britain’s most affected region – central England and East Wales – and found that record heats were at least 10 times greater because of the human-generated greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
The study found that extreme heat across Europe had increased even more than had been estimated by climate models.
Computer-generated models estimate that greenhouse gas emissions raised temperatures by 2C in the July heat wave. But in fact the heat wave was 4 degrees hotter than without artificial warming.
“In Europe and other parts of the world, we are seeing more and more record-breaking heat waves that are causing extreme temperatures that have become hotter faster than in most climate models,” said Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. for climate change.
“It is a worrying finding that suggests that if carbon emissions are not reduced soon, the impact of climate change on extreme heat in Europe, which is already extremely deadly, could be even worse than we previously thought.”
In 2020, scientists from the UK’s Met Office calculated that the probability of temperatures above 40C in the natural climate – that is, not man-made warming – is about one in 1000 years.
Today, that estimate stands at one in 100 years, but scientists involved in the study said observed extreme weather events happened even faster than predicted by models.
“Even with a conservative estimate, we see a large role of climate change in the heat wave in the UK,” said Mariam Zachariah, a research associate at the Grantham Institute.
“Under our current climate, which has been changed by greenhouse gas emissions, many people experience events in their lifetime that would otherwise have been nearly impossible. And the longer it takes us to reach net zero, the worse the heat waves will get. .”
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