July Heat Waves Nearly Impossible Without Climate Change, Study Says

livemint.com:

The extreme heat blanketing the southern regions of the U.S., Mexico, and Europe this month would have been nearly impossible without the warming effects of human-induced climate change, according to a study released Tuesday by a group of European scientists who carry out rapid assessments of extreme weather events. The study by World Weather Attribution, a group of researchers based in London and the Netherlands, found that three separate heat waves in July across the Northern Hemisphere were made much worse because of decades of fossil-fuel emissions that have raised the planet’s average temperature by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century.

“It’s something that we definitely will see more of in the future," said Friederike Otto, co-founder of World Weather Attribution, an author on the new study and a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute in London. “We don’t know what the new normal or the new extreme will be in the future because we don’t know when we will stop burning fossil fuels." The study hasn’t been peer-reviewed, which is considered the gold standard for validating research findings; however, it is based on peer-reviewed methods the group published in 2020.

To assess the recent heat waves, the scientists ran a dozen climate models comparing the temperatures observed this month with projections of a similar world without climate warming. They concluded that without human-induced climate change, the extreme heat in China would have been about a one-in-250-year event, while the heat waves in July in the U.S., Mexico, and southern Europe would have been virtually impossible.