Records are falling.
On Friday, France’s meteorological agency, Meteo France, announced a new record high temperature of over 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45.1 Celsius) in the baking nation, set in the southeast part of the country. Before Friday, the country’s all-time record was 111 degrees.
France has validated temperature records going back 150 years. (And in Paris, records go back to 1658, when Louis the Great reigned over the nation.)
France isn’t alone. A potent heat wave has settled over Europe this week, with a nexus of weather and climate conditions producing record temperatures. Heat waves in Europe, however, are increasing in both frequency and intensity.
“Heat records do of course happen much more frequently due to global heating,” Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told Mashable on Wednesday as all-time June temperatures were broken across the continent. “That is entirely as expected, and it will continue as long as we heat the planet by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.”
Over the last century, Europe has increasingly experienced heat waves, and since 1500 AD, the region’s five hottest summers have occurred in 2018, 2016, 2010, 2003, and 2002. Expectedly, records will continue to break as Earth’s overall temperatures continue their relentless, accelerated rise.
Already, boosted global temperatures have at least doubled the probability of heat extremes in Europe, similar to last summer’s scorching events, explained Len Shaffrey, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, in the UK.
SEE ALSO: Choose your future Greenland, Earthlings
Heat events and unusual warmth will certainly occur regardless of climate change, but now the episodes are amplified, which means more broken records. This month, a slower-moving weather pattern in the high atmosphere (jet stream) allowed a mass of hot air from Africa to sit over Europe, baking the continent.
Strong Rossby wave activity in the northern mid-lats since early June! Red=northward flow, blue southward flow. Watch the red blob linger over Europe, bringing in warm air. 7-day averages centered on the stated day, using forecast at the end. #heatwave pic.twitter.com/Cl6rvNTziC
— Stefan Rahmstorf (@rahmstorf) June 24, 2019
There’s evidence that these sort of persistent weather patterns, which invite extreme weather, are increasing as the globe warms.
Heat waves — which kill more people than any other extreme weather event — will almost certainly keep getting worse, everywhere. Research has shown that if carbon emissions keep increasing, much of the globe will experience “the permanent emergence of unprecedented summer heat” in the coming decades. This means, by mid-century, even “cool” summers will be hotter than the hottest summers we experience today.
Without ambitious efforts to slash carbon-intensive industry, energy, and transportation, global carbon emissions won’t even reach their peak for another decade.
Today, levels of the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide are higher than they’ve been in at least 800,000 years, though it’s likely millions of years. And things aren’t slowing down. Today, the rate of carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere is unprecedented in both the historic and geologic record.
