All heat waves carry the characteristic, measurable footprint of global warming, scientists specializing in the link between extreme weather events and climate change said on Wednesday.
Warming caused by human activities also increases the frequency and intensity of floods in some regions of the world and of some droughts, but the link is less systematic, according to the paper released Wednesday and presented as a guide for journalists.
"There is no doubt that climate change is changing the rules of the game when it comes to heat waves"One of the authors, Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London, told AFP.
"Every heat wave in the world today is stronger and more likely to occur due to human-caused climate change."insist the researcher and her co-author Ben Clarke, from the University of Oxford, in the document.
Until recently, scientists were reluctant to formally link a particular event to climate change, but the science of attribution has made tremendous progress in recent years, identifying and quantifying the responsibility for warming in a weather event, sometimes in matter of days.
For example, Friederike Otto and her colleagues at World Weather Attribution estimated that the episode of extraordinary heat that hit North America in June 2021, with a record 49.6ºC in Canada, would have been "almost impossible" without global warming.
This spring’s heat wave in India and Pakistan is still being analyzed, but "what we see now will be normal, if not even cold, in a world between +2º and +3º C"Otto points out.
At the moment, the world has gained almost +1.2ºC on average compared to the pre-industrial era.
All heat waves carry the characteristic, measurable footprint of global warming, scientists specializing in the link between extreme weather events and climate change said on Wednesday.
Warming caused by human activities also increases the frequency and intensity of floods in some regions of the world and of some droughts, but the link is less systematic, according to the paper released Wednesday and presented as a guide for journalists.
"There is no doubt that climate change is changing the rules of the game when it comes to heat waves"One of the authors, Friederike Otto, from Imperial College London, told AFP.
"Every heat wave in the world today is stronger and more likely to occur due to human-caused climate change."insist the researcher and her co-author Ben Clarke, from the University of Oxford, in the document.
Until recently, scientists were reluctant to formally link a particular event to climate change, but the science of attribution has made tremendous progress in recent years, identifying and quantifying the responsibility for warming in a weather event, sometimes in matter of days.
For example, Friederike Otto and her colleagues at World Weather Attribution estimated that the episode of extraordinary heat that hit North America in June 2021, with a record 49.6ºC in Canada, would have been "almost impossible" without global warming.
This spring’s heat wave in India and Pakistan is still being analyzed, but "what we see now will be normal, if not even cold, in a world between +2º and +3º C"Otto points out.
At the moment, the world has gained almost +1.2ºC on average compared to the pre-industrial era.