by The intensifying and expansive heat wave that affects around 150 million people in the United States, from Wisconsin to Washington, DC, bears the characteristics of warming the earth caused by humans.
Hundreds of daily temperature records will be threatened during the coming days, especially along the east coast, and some records with high temperature of June can also be connected or broken.
Milestones for record -warm overnight Low temperatures are also set – another sign of climate change. Night temperatures are heated faster than during the day, which worsens the health consequences of heat waves. This is especially the case in cities, where the urban heat island effect keeps the temperatures high at night.
The American heat wave almost comes together with burning high temperatures in Western Europe, which made global warming much more likely and intense.
Of all forms of extreme weather – drought, floods, hurricanes – heat waves are those who can most reliably bind scientists to climate change caused by pollution of fossil fuels. While the world is warming up, the chance of extreme heat events increases dramatically, while the chance and the severity of the record cold extremes decrease.
“The physical process of the more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere lead to hotter and more frequent heat waves is well understood and simple,” said Fredi Otto, a climate scientist who leads the World Weather Attribution Project, an international effort that investigates the role of climate change in individual weather conditions.
“Every heat wave that takes place today is hotter than the climate change caused by man,” she said.
The heat waves that we now experience occur in 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming, with even more serious heat probably in the coming decades as the global average temperatures continue to rise.
In recent years, researchers have discovered that some heat waves would have been impossible without the temperature boost of global warming. Others are tens of more chance up to hundreds of times and hotter than hotter than they would have been without the consequences of climate pollution.
A shopper holds a bag of ice cream in a check-out line in a supermarket during 90 degrees temperatures on June 20, in Boulder, Colorado. – Mark Makela/Getty – Images
This was the case with the Pacific Northwest Heat Wave from 2021, a Siberian heat wave in 2020 and a heat wave from the United Kingdom in 2022, among other things more recent events.
In short, climate change ensures that heat waves occur more often, intense and long -term. They also touch both earlier and later in the warm season, and in many parts of the world also become more humid, making them more dangerous.
Some studies have shown that global weather patterns are conducive to simultaneous heat waves on different continents, such as the US and the European heat waves this month, are becoming increasingly common during the summer of the Northern Hemisphere.
According to a rapid scientific analysis, the British heat wave this month, which temperatures up to 92 degrees Fahrenheit in Surrey, England, was 100 times more likely in the current climate than prior to the era of the Earth’s warming.
Three straight days of temperatures above 82 degrees in southeastern England are now about 100 times more likely to perform compared to the pre-global warming-up time, the analysis said before people started burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas for energy.
In the US, heat waves are the deadliest form of extreme weather. The current is particularly threatening because it is the first of the season, which means that the circumstances occur more often during the peak of the summer, not in June.
Poeple walk over the Big Four Bridge while the Sun is going in Waterfront Park on 22 June in Louisville, Kentucky. – Jon Cherry/AP
The temperatures are set to rise close or in the triple figures along the Amtrak Acela gang from Washington to New York City, with heat indices that are as high as 110 degrees or even higher at some locations. Such circumstances will make it dangerous to be outside for a longer period of time, and the lack of overnight lighting about the night will increase the threat of public health.
In most parts of the world outside the tropics, including the US and the UK, heat waves that are now taking place would have been a maximum of 7 degrees cooler without burning fossil fuels, Otto said.
“Due to its influence on extreme heat, human climate change caused a huge burden on societies, which leads to thousands of premature deaths and a great pressure on infrastructure and ecosystems,” said Otto. “Moreover, extreme heat leads to agricultural losses and a large loss of productivity.”
Otto sounded an extra remark of caution: computer models “underestimate” the extreme heat trends that we see so far, which means that projections for future extreme heat are probably also underestimated.
It is thought that this is due to changes in air pollutants known as aerosols, as well as shifts in weather patterns that can also be caused by climate change.
Michael Mann, a climate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has also found that models are struggling with heat wave projections in the context of climate change. In recent years, his research has found an increase in the occurrence of continuing heat umbrella organizations, as those now occur, which have rarely been picked up by the climate models.
“Climate models can probably be underestimated from the relationship between climate change and persistent extremes of the summer weather today and while predicting the potential for future increase in such extremes,” he said CNN.
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