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The current heatwave in northern Europe was made twice as likely by climate change, according to a preliminary analysis.
Temperatures have soared over much of Europe over the last month, regularly exceeding 30°C and several temperature records have been broken. The conditions have been so extreme that wildfires have broken out in Sweden and the UK.
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Heatwaves are one of the most likely consequences of climate change. As the average global temperature rises due to higher levels of greenhouse gases, more extreme bouts of high temperatures follow.
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But heatwaves do happen anyway. To find out if the current heatwave was made more likely by climate change, a team at World Weather Attribution led by Friederike Otto of the University of Oxford, UK has conducted a rapid-response study.
Extreme heat
They ran climate models with and without our greenhouse gas emissions and tracked how often heatwaves like the current one occurred in both cases.
“We estimate that the probability to have such a heat or higher is generally more than two times higher today than if human activities had not altered climate,” the team reports.
The intensity of the climate effect varies somewhat from country to country. “In Ireland and Denmark climate models give a very similar increase in probabilities to the observations — roughly a factor two more likely in Dublin and a factor four in Denmark,” the team writes.
The team was unable to put a figure on the increase in the risk of heatwaves in Scandinavia, because summer temperatures that far north are very variable anyway. They “can conclude that anthropogenic climate change increased the odds of a heat wave as observed in 2018 in Scandinavia but we cannot quantify by how much”.
The team estimates that similar heatwaves will return soon. In particular, comparable heatwaves will now strike Dublin and the Netherlands every four to seven years in the current climate – “even though they are close to record-high compared to earlier climates”.
“This analysis confirms what we already know – that we are suffering an extreme weather event caused by climate change,” says Gareth Redmond-King, a climate change specialist at WWF. “World leading academics are warning us that, like a disaster movie, this is going to get worse and we know this will impact our nature, wildlife, people and food supplies.
“We urgently need ambitious action to cut our emissions and to build a cleaner, greener economy to tackle climate change before we pass the point of no return that we are so very near.”
Weather forecasts could soon include information about whether specific dangerous weather events are made more likely by climate change.
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