Extreme Heat, Floods, Fire: Was Summer 2023 the New Normal?
climate change in those hotter years, “you get really intense conditions," White said. The long stretches of warm weather are affecting everything from food production to everyday activities. Farmers in Italy are growing mangoes, bananas and other tropical fruits.
In the U.S., people are running errands after the sun sets, when it’s cooler. Wildfires The blistering heat has helped worsen drought conditions around the globe, stoking fires in Greece, Spain, the U.S. and Canada.
A team from World Weather Attribution, a group of climate scientists based in London and the Netherlands, found that fire weather—a composite measure of temperature, rainfall, wind and humidity that influences the spread of wildfires—has been boosted by underlying climate warming. The researchers focused their analysis on the conditions and fires this year in Quebec, which contributed to the heavy plumes of smoke that blanketed a huge swatch of the Eastern U.S. in June.
Their study found the weather conditions that spawned the record-breaking Quebec fires were twice as likely to occur and up to 50% more intense as the result of climate warming. Quebec experienced less snow cover, which usually blankets the ground and tamps down potential fires, as well as severe drought conditions, said Yan Boulanger, research scientist at the Canadian Forest Service. May and June broke the previous national temperature record for the two-month period by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit and fueled the spread of wildfires.
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