According to an international team of scientists, the long heat wave that hit Siberia, which hit a record 100.4 degrees last month, would not have happened without climate change.
The vast Russian province has been baking since January with temperatures over 9 degrees above average for the first six months of the year, according to the World Meteorological Organization. The warm conditions caused forest fires that burned more than 2.8 million acres in late June.
An analysis led by the UK Met office and published on Wednesday found that the prolonged heat wave was made 600 times more likely due to human-caused climate change.
“This study shows again how much climate change changes with respect to heat waves,” Friederike Otto, one of the study’s co-authors, said in a statement Thursday.
The World Meteorological Organization said the findings were among the strongest results from studies to date that attribute the effects of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events.
The prolonged episode is a very rare event, expected to occur only once every 130 years, even with climate change, the study found. But if it had happened in 1900, the heat wave would have been 3.6 degrees cooler than the temperatures observed this year.
By 2050, a similar heat wave could be up to 9 degrees warmer than has been seen now, according to the report.
Such high temperatures in the Arctic Circle have many consequences for the environment and communities.
The widespread fires that started in June released about 56 million tons of carbon dioxide, a figure that is more than annual emissions for many countries such as Switzerland and Norway, the World Meteorological Organization said.
The combination of emissions from the fires and the melting of permafrost in the Arctic Circle due to heat will only exacerbate global warming, the organization said.
The heat wave in Siberia has also contributed to making the global average temperature during the first five months of 2020 the second highest on record, according to the study.
Heat waves are also among the deadliest extreme weather events, according to the World Health Organization. A 44-day extreme heat event in Russia in 2010 resulted in 56,000 deaths.
Given the risks to human health, steps should be taken to mitigate the effects of heat waves, even in historically cold climates, said Otto, acting director of the Institute for Environmental Change at Oxford University in the UK.
“As emissions continue to rise, we must think about increasing resilience to extreme heat worldwide, including in Arctic communities, which would have seemed absurd not long ago,” he added.
The findings also have scientists demanding a reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions.
“We are beginning to experience extreme events that have almost no chance of happening without (a) the human footprint on the climate system,” said Sonia Seneviratne, climate scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric and Climate Sciences at ETH Zurich.
“We have little time left to stabilize global warming at levels where climate change remains within the limits of the Paris Agreement,” he added, referring to the 2015 agreement that saw 195 countries set their own national targets to reduce or control heat pollution. -capture of gases.
President Donald Trump withdrew the United States, the second largest climate polluter and the world’s largest economy, from the Paris Agreement in May 2017 and began the process last November.
However, the withdrawal process takes a year and would not become official until at least the day after the 2020 presidential elections.
