Pollution from burning fossil fuels has increased the chances of a prolonged heat spell: Experts (Representation)
Paris:
A recent heat wave in Siberia that saw temperature records tumble as the region peaked at 38 degrees Celsius was “almost impossible” without the influence of human-induced climate change, major scientists said on Wednesday.
An international team of researchers has discovered that the record warm period had been 2 ° C warmer than it would have been if humans had not warmed the planet for decades with greenhouse gas emissions .
The hottest five years in history have occurred in the past five years and there is a better chance that 2020 will be the hottest on record.
The Earth’s poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, and temperatures in Siberia – home to much of the world‘s carbon-rich permafrost – were more than 5 ° C warmer than average between January and June .
One city, Verkhoyansk, recorded a temperature of 38 ° C, breaking previous records.
Andrew Ciavarella, senior detection and attribution scientist at the British Met Office, called the results “narcotic”.
“This is further proof of the extreme temperatures we can expect to see more frequently in the world under global warming,” he said.
The impact of climate change on extreme weather events such as super storms and droughts is now well established, but until relatively recently scientists have not been able to definitively link an individual event to warming climatic.
As part of a growing field of climate research known as attribution science, the team performed computer simulations of temperatures with the climate as it is today – about 1C more hot as the baseline of the pre-industrial era.
They then compared this to a model generating temperatures over Siberia this year without human influence – that is, without the additional artificial 1C.
They discovered that prolonged heat would occur less than once every 80,000 years without human-induced climate change.
This makes the heat wave “almost impossible in a climate that has not been warmed by greenhouse gas emissions,” the team said, adding that the carbon pollution had made the event extreme in minus 600 times more likely to occur.
– “Important for everyone” –
The team behind the calculations pointed out that the Siberian heat wave was a problem for the whole world.
Some 1.15 million hectares of burning forest have released millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. At the same time, forest fires and prolonged heat waves accelerated the melting of the region’s permafrost.
This caused an oil tank built on frozen ground to collapse in May, resulting in one of the worst oil spills in the region.
“Such a prolonged heat wave is important, not only for its influence on people, but also from a scientific point of view,” said Olga Zolina, of Russia P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanography.
“The Arctic is very, very important in general for the formation of weather and traffic conditions. So these high temperatures are really important for the whole world.”
Although the research has been compiled quickly and has not yet been peer reviewed, the authors said it produced “among the best results of any attribution study to date” .
– ‘No chance’ –
Paris 2015 climate agreement commits nations to limit temperature increases to “well below” 2 ° C (3.6 degrees Farenheit) above pre-industrial levels and to strive to achieve a limit of 1.5 ° C if possible.
With only 1C of warming so far, the Earth is already shaken by record droughts, forest fires and super storms made more powerful by rising sea levels.
To stay in line with the 1.5 C target, the United Nations has declared that global emissions must fall by 7.6% each year this decade.
Sonia Seneviratne, Department of Environmental Systems Sciences at ETH Zurich, said research has shown the heat wave to be an example of “extreme events with almost no chance of happening” with no original emissions human.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
