Analysis of July’s heatwave reveals that two of the locations where temperatures were recorded would have been “statistically impossible” if the planet hadn’t warmed by roughly 1.2C since the late 1800s.
Climate change made this week’s record-breaking heatwave in the United Kingdom at least ten times more likely, according to a new study.
According to the World Weather Attribution group’s (WWA) initial study, hundreds of people are believed to have perished as a result of the extreme heat, while official data have yet to be released.
Extreme weather caused major disruptions to transportation networks and hundreds of fires, some of which were deadly and damaged homes.
On 19 July, during the heatwave, the temperature at Coningsby, Lincolnshire, reached 40.3 degrees Celsius, 1.6 degrees hotter than the previous record set just three years prior.
Emmanuel Raju, from the Copenhagen Centre for Disaster Research at Copenhagen University, said that the effects of heatwaves are frequently “quite unequally spread across demographics,” with impoverished communities frequently missing green space, shade, and water.
This month, the heatwave spread throughout much of Europe.
The scientists chose the United Kingdom for its most recent analysis, however, since the nation is “especially unused to high temperatures like we have witnessed in the past week,” according to Friederike Otto, senior climate science lecturer at Imperial College London.
Two of the locations where temperatures were reported would have been statistically impossible if the planet hadn’t warmed by around 1.2 degrees Celsius since the late 1800s, the paper stated.
The multinational network is at the forefront of scientific efforts to rapidly quantify the impact of climate change on recent extreme weather occurrences.
The 21 academics engaged in this study compared the current global climate, which has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius, to historical weather records.
While computer studies indicate that climate change contributed to a 2C temperature increase during the heatwave, historical data indicate that temperatures were approximately 4C colder in pre-industrial times, before global warming began to boost them.
The 10-fold increase in the likelihood of such intense heat striking the United Kingdom owing to climate change is a “conservative estimate,” according to the scientists, because “extreme temperatures” have risen more than predicted by climate models.
This also shows that the effects of the climate issue on heatwaves may be harsher than previously believed.
Dr. Otto added that, for western Europe, “there must be something in the climate system that has a bigger influence here… that is simply not included in the models.”
Two years ago, Met Office scientists determined that the probability of seeing 40°C in the United Kingdom in any given year had increased from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 100.
Fraser Lott, an attribution scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre and co-author of the report, remarked, “It was alarming to have such an event occur so soon after that study and to see the raw data come back from our weather stations.”
Professor Tim Palmer, Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University, asserted that error margins should have been incorporated into the group’s estimations, given the difficulties associated with existing climate models.
