The Simple Truth About These Miserable Heat Waves
In order to determine whether such an event can be attributed to climate change, researchers manage complex models based on historical observations: one showing the world as it is and the other “an alternative world where there is no human influence on the climate”, declared Nicholas Leach, physicist at the University of Oxford who seeks bad weather and climatic impacts on health. From there, scientists can determine the probability that a specific extreme meteorological event would be in a world without climate change, that is to say with lower concentrations of greenhouse gas caused by humans in the atmosphere. Other studies, according to Leach, more specifically reproduce the exact atmospheric models and conditions which produced a particular heat wave in these two worlds, observing how the intensity and severity of the resulting heat wave would change in a world where human activity does not cause an increase in temperatures.
It is generally easier to determine whether climate change has contributed to heat waves compared to hurricanes, which can vary depending on any number of factors in the oceans and the atmosphere. “We warm the atmosphere, and there is a very strong link between doing it and the hottest situations possible warmer,” explains Leach. “The link between climate change and thermodynamics has been included for 100 years.”
Researchers always work to understand what climate change does precisely in atmospheric blocks that produce heat waves, especially in the case of extraordinary events when temperatures are far from the historic observation range, such as the heat wave in the northwest of the Pacific of 2021, which caused hundreds of excessive deaths in the United States and Canada. A study revealed that the heat waves which “occur approximately every five to 10 years” in the same region if the overall temperature averages were to exceed two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
Like Nathan Gillett – another co -author of the study on climatic indicators and researcher from the Canadian Center for Modeling and Climate Analysis – took me, the world already knows heat waves which “would have been much less likely or almost impossible without climate change induced by humans”. These heat waves will worsen while humans burn more fossil fuels and continue to shave the forests, which quickly exhausts the planet’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The more there is in the atmosphere, the more hot it becomes. “There is great confidence,” said Gillett, “that with the current greenhouse gas emissions, the world will continue to warm up and heat the waves will continue to be warmer. It will happen everywhere.”
