Who Pays for the Climate Crime
The record-breaking heat scorching Europe day and night this month would not have been possible without climate change, according to a new study released Friday by World Weather Attribution. The rapid study found the heat would have been virtually impossible just five decades ago and is 200 times more likely today than it would have been 20 years ago, while millions in France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and elsewhere are left to endure the consequences.
The heat wave that started on June 18 has pushed daytime temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in many places, while high nighttime temperatures have made it harder for people to cool down and recover. The burden lands on ordinary people, not on the institutions that keep burning fossil fuels and then ask everyone else to adapt to the wreckage.
The scientists said 45% of the 850 cities analyzed across 30 European countries have broken, or are expected to hit, records for heat stress levels, a measure that includes humidity and temperature. World Weather Attribution researchers said this marks the most severe heat wave ever recorded in this region of Europe and the most severe humid heat event.
The Apparatus Calls It Weather
The study used observed temperature data and forecasts to analyze the heat wave. It also found that a heat wave with similar characteristics occurring in the climate of June 1976 would have been about 3.5 degrees Celsius cooler during the day and about 2 degrees Celsius cooler in 2003. Nighttime temperatures would have been about 2.4 degrees Celsius cooler in June 1976 and about 1.3 degrees Celsius cooler in 2003. The researchers chose 1976 and 2003 for comparison because those years saw extreme heat in Europe.
“The increase in temperatures was so dramatic that we would have expected to have never seen this event in the 1976 climate,” said the study’s lead author Theodore Keeping, also a climate scientist at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. “And it would also still have been very, very rare, even 23 years ago in 2003.”
World Weather Attribution, a Europe-based collaborative of scientists who study the causes of global extreme weather events, began assessing in 2015 the extent to which those could be attributed to climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas. The organization’s rapid attribution studies, including this one, are not peer-reviewed but use peer-reviewed methodology.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing at twice the speed as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. In a separate study last year, WWA researchers found there were about 1,500 climate change-caused deaths during a European heat wave last summer.
What People Are Forced to Endure
This week, weather agencies across Europe have issued red alerts about heat risks, and sporting events, schools, public transportation and attractions have been limited as a result. Many of these countries do not have widespread air conditioning or other infrastructure to account for warmer climates, leaving people to absorb the damage of decisions made far above them.
France, which has been bearing much of the brunt of the heat wave, recorded its hottest day ever this week and has also reported 40 deaths from drownings as people seek cooling relief. The heat and humidity make for a dangerous combination for humans, and Keeping said the heat stress metric directly relates to the human body’s ability to cool down and to expected health impacts.
The WWA scientists said the current El Nino warming cycle did not influence this heat. Europe also experienced record-shattering high temperatures in May. Typically, Europe does not see dramatically warmer weather until July and August.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research, said the findings are reasonable but may downplay climate change’s role in the heat. “If anything, this latest assessment — and all similar assessments — are actually underestimating the role that climate change is playing here,” Mann said, noting that he has separately studied how climate change is increasing heat stress in North America.
Keeping said the heat wave shows the need to adapt infrastructure and behavior to extreme temperatures. “We need to expect them to happen. They’re only going to become more frequent in the near term,” he said. “We also need to address the source of climate change as well. And that is very simply carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.”