June 20 (Reuters) – According to new study, climate warming is causing deadly heat waves to spread over the Northern Hemisphere this week and will continue to produce extreme weather for decades to come.
It is a global heat wave that we are currently experiencing. That puts pressure on our choices,” said Christiana Figueres, the former head of the UN climate agency.
How Is Heat Caused by Climate Change?
As fossil fuels are continuously used, carbon emissions are released into the atmosphere, trapping more solar heat and raising the average global temperature. The average worldwide temperature has increased by almost 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
Because of this higher baseline, all heat waves are already becoming hotter and more frequent than they would have been in the absence of atmospheric warming. “Any significant heat wave has been made substantially more likely and warmer than it otherwise would have been as a result of human-caused climate change,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
How Significant Is Climate Change as a Factor?
Although El Nino, La Nina, and regional circulation patterns play a role, global warming remains a major contributing factor to heat waves. In comparison to natural systems like woods or wetlands, land cover, which has dark surfaces and constructed settings, tends to get hotter.
“Attribution studies” are used by scientists to pinpoint the precise degree to which a certain heat wave is influenced by climate change. For instance, climate change made the deadly heat that occurred in April across South Asia 45 times more likely. Temperatures in Kolkata reached 46 C (115 F), which is ten degrees higher than the seasonal average.
In the Near Future, What Can We Anticipate?
The world has already produced enough carbon emissions to guarantee that climate change will continue to raise global temperatures for decades, even if all emissions were stopped today. Emissions must be reduced by half from 1995 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2050 in order to limit the increase in global temperature to approximately 1.5 C (2.7 F) beyond preindustrial levels. But since 1995, emissions have only gone up, which means that by 2100, the earth will have warmed by 2.7 C (4.9 F).
“The fact that millions of people in the United States are being subjected to unprecedented heat waves is indicative of the fact that we have yet to address the worst of climate change,” Figueres stated to Reuters.
Get updated on ESG news and insights by subscribing to the Reuters Sustainable Finance newsletter. Let’s take immediate action to halt climate change and save our future.