Study Says Canada’s Heat Wave Would Have Been “Nearly Impossible” Without Climate Change | Climate change | Climate and environment

The unusual ola de calor that afectó la semana pasada al suroeste de Canadá y el noroeste de EE UU con temperaturas record habría sido “casi imposible” si el planeta no estuviera inmerso en un proceso de cambio climático alimentado por los gases de efecto invernadero que expulsa human being. This is concluded by an express analysis prepared by scientists from the Global weather attribution (WWA), an international group dedicated to analyzing the influence of global warming on extreme weather events. Researchers warn that as climate change accelerates, events as strange as this wave will be “much less rare.”

The heat wave off the Pacific coast of North America, which claimed the lives of hundreds of people and was accompanied by severe forest fires, brought down all historical temperature curves. Because, as the authors of this report emphasize, it is not normal for it to exceed 45 degrees at the latitudes where the heat wave occurred.

In the small Canadian town of Lytton (of around 250 inhabitants and at a latitude similar to Berlin), 49.6 degrees were recorded, according to the local press – in Spain, the temperature record was recorded in 2017 in Montoro ( Córdoba) and it was 47.3 degrees. “The temperatures observed were so extreme that they are very far from the range of temperatures historically observed”, explain the authors of this express analysis.

Reports attributing extreme events to climate change often analyze the data to determine the likelihood that they occurred in the absence of global warming. In the case of the heatwave off the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada, it was 150 times more likely due to climate change.

“Climate change is making extremely rare events like this more frequent. We are entering uncharted territory. The temperatures experienced in Canada last week would have broken records in Las Vegas or Spain, ”explained Sonia Seneviratne, of the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, in Zurich, and one of the authors of the ‘to analyse.

The researchers also conclude that this heat wave was about two degrees warmer than it would have been if it had occurred at the start of the Industrial Revolution, that is, before humans begins to use fossil fuels on a large scale, the main cause of the greenhouse effect. gas emission.

While the heatwave was still active, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had already warned that it was an “exceptional and dangerous” phenomenon. WMO did not establish a direct relationship between this phenomenon and climate change, but recalled that scientific studies indicate an increase in waves due to global warming.

WWA researchers emphasize the same idea when they point out that as warming progresses, waves like last week’s will be much less rare. These scientists argue that the climate crisis is leading humanity towards a new scenario “which has important consequences for health, well-being and lifestyle”. This is why they are calling for measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of currently irreversible warming so that society is prepared “for a very different future”.

You can follow CLIMA ET ENVIRONNEMENT on Facebook and Twitter, or subscribe here to receive our weekly newsletter