Less than a month ago, the world was shocked when the temperature in the arctic circle it reached a record 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. While notable in its own right, it was simply the exclamation point of an astonishing, protracted, and widespread heat event across the entire Siberian Arctic.
The extreme and unusual heat in this region alarmed scientists around the world, prompting a group of 14 scientists from six countries to collaborate on a study to discover how this could occur off-limits. On Wednesday, the researchers published their findings in a large climate attribution study, stating: “This protracted, large-scale event would have been essentially impossible without climate change.”
To put it in perspective, the team found that if, hypothetically, you lived in this region before around 1900, when man-made climate change began to emerge, such a long, prolonged, and intense heat event would only occur once every 80,000 years: or approximately once every 1,000 lives.
RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF EMERGENCY / AFP via Getty Images
The study determined that the probability of experiencing a regional heat event of this magnitude today, compared to 1900, is 600 times greater. And even in today’s warmer weather, it would only be expected to happen once every 130 years.
“The findings of this rapid investigation (that climate change increased the chances of prolonged heat in Siberia by at least 600 times) are truly staggering,” said Andrew Ciavarella, lead author of the research and chief detection and attribution scientist in the UK . Meteorological Office.
The study examined the role of human-induced climate change in the probability and intensity of two specific events: the persistent heat throughout the Siberian region from January to June, and the record temperature of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit set in Verkhoyansk, Siberia, on June 20.
During the first six months of this year, temperatures in the vast expanse of Siberia, an area larger than the entire United States, averaged 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. The image below shows the study area (outlined in the rectangular box) and above-average temperatures in orange-red shading, using degrees Celsius.
Andrew Ciavarella et al.
To illustrate the unusual persistence of heat, the visual image below, by arctic climate expert Zack Labe, shows deviations from the average temperatures over Siberia for each month from January to June. The darker shade of red indicates temperatures of 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
To investigate weather anomalies, the research team examined the temperature records of the observation surface and recreated the weather using dozens of weather computer models.
To measure the effect of climate change, scientists performed computer simulations to compare the climate as it is today with the climate as it would have been in 1900, when there was much less in the way of trapping heat from greenhouse gases and pollution.
On the question of the likelihood of the 100.4 degree record in the city of Verkhoyansk occurring in June, the study found that this was a 1 in 140 year event in our current warm climate, and several thousand times more likely to what it would have been like at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before humans substantially heated the planet.
On the question of how likely a regional heat event of this year’s magnitude is, the study found it to be a 1 in 130 year event in today’s warmer weather, 600 times more likely than it would have been in 1900.
The study also found that from 1900 to 2020, the human impact on the climate made the regional heat event about 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. And he estimates that in the future, if a similar heat wave were to occur three decades from now, in 2050, the intensity could be around 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer compared to 1900.
“These results show that we are beginning to experience extreme events that would have almost no chance of occurring without a human footprint in the climate system,” explained Professor Sonia Seneviratne of ETH Zurich. “We have little time left to stabilize global warming at levels where climate change remains within the limits of the Paris Agreement.”
The results of the study were so dramatic that even one of its most experienced climate attribution authors, Dr. Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Oxford University Institute for Environmental Change, was shocked.
“It is by far the strongest change in an individual event that I have seen compared to everything else I have studied so far,” he said.
As a result of noticeable heat and dryness, 8,000 square miles of Siberia have caught fire in wildfires, significantly more fire coverage than last year up to this point. In June alone, these fires released 56 megatons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, more than Switzerland’s annual emissions. This leads to a dangerous feedback loop in which the additional carbon in the atmosphere further warms the planet.
Extensive warming is also causing another feedback loop in the Arctic by melting sea ice at a prolific rate. Right now, the extent of the sea ice adjacent to Siberia in the Laptev Sea is not only on record decline, but has metaphorically fallen off a cliff.
The disappearance of sea ice results in less sunlight reflecting off light-colored ice in space; instead, the darkest and most exposed surfaces on Earth absorb more heat. As a result, the Arctic is warming up three times faster than the global average. This phenomenon is called arctic amplification.
These drastic changes bring home the degree to which humans have become a force of nature, heating the climate through the burning of fossil fuels that release heat trapping. Greenhouse gases and handling previously unimaginable extremes in our history.
“Now we are seeing events far outside of what our societies are adapted to,” Otto said. “Climate change is already here, not only is it a problem for someone else, but heat waves threaten lives and livelihoods everywhere.”
Although he does not believe that climate change ends the human race completely, he warns that it will lead to dangerous instability and will increasingly compromise the most vulnerable: “it exacerbates inequalities and, therefore, is a multiplier of other threats to our societies, as it is always those who are marginalized anyway and pay the highest price. “
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