Explainer-How climate change drives heatwaves and wildfires in Europe
By Kate Abnett
BRUSSELS (Reuters) — Europe is once again battling scorching temperatures this summer, with wildfires blazing across the continent from the Mediterranean to Spain. Here's how climate change drives these events.
HOTTER, MORE FREQUENT HEATWAVES
Climate change makes heatwaves hotter and more frequent. This is the case for most land regions, and has been confirmed by the United Nations' global panel of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have heated the planet by about 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. That warmer baseline means higher temperatures can be reached during extreme heat events.
Every heatwave being experienced today has been hotter and more frequent due to climate change, said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who co-leads the World Weather Attribution global research collaboration.
But other conditions affect heatwaves too. In Europe, atmospheric circulation is an important factor.
FINGERPRINTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE
To find out exactly how much climate change affected a specific heatwave, scientists conduct «attribution studies». Since 2004, more than 400 such studies have been done for extreme weather events, including heat, floods and drought — calculating how much of a role climate change played in each.
This involves simulating the modern climate hundreds of times and comparing it to simulations of a climate without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
For example, scientists with World Weather Attribution determined that a record-breaking heatwave in western Europe in June 2019 was 100 times more likely to occur now in France and the Netherlands than if humans had
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