The heat wave that hit England last week is at least 10 times greater Climate change, scientists conclude in a study published this week. On July 19, temperatures at Heathrow Airport soared above 40 degrees Celsius and records were broken at 46 local monitoring stations across the country. Emergency calls for ambulances increased and several fires broke out on the outskirts of London.
Scientists say that without human-caused climate change, which has already warmed the world by 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, this extreme warming event is highly unlikely. “We live in a world where temperatures are rising very fast,” said Friedrich Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. “At 1.3 degrees Celsius or 1.4 degrees Celsius, this kind of event would already be very rare.”
Climate change is making heat waves more frequent and severe, according to the World Weather Association (WWA), an international research consortium challenging the role of climate change. Extreme events. To determine how climate change may have affected the anomalies of this particular heatwave in the UK, 21 WWA climate scientists, including Friedrich Otto, analyzed the event using meteorological data and computer simulations. Climate Today with the past.
So, they found that before the industrial revolution and global warming increased emissions. Heat wave The chance of occurrence would have been very low and would have been 4 degrees Celsius colder. However, the scientists said their estimates were conservative because extreme temperatures in Western Europe increased more than their climate models simulated.
“Climate models are systematically biased in that they underestimate the trend of extreme temperatures in Western European summers due to climate change,” explains Otto. In May, the WWA determined that a South Asian heat wave in March and April this year was 30 times more likely to occur due to climate change, and that last year’s Pacific Northwest heat wave was “almost impossible”.
Scientists have been unable to provide such a definitive statement for England’s heat wave. However, given how quickly past warnings are becoming reality, these researchers think there is cause for alarm.
“Two years ago, UK Met Office scientists put the chance of seeing 40 degrees in the UK in a given year as 1 in 100, as opposed to 1 in 1000 in a natural climate,” UK climate scientist Fraser Ladd said. Office Hadley Center, in a statement. “It’s shocking that something like this is happening so soon after this study.”
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