The early summer heatwave scorching much of western Europe would have been “virtually impossible” just 50 years ago. That is the main conclusion of a study by World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of scientists that specializes in producing reports on extreme weather events and climate change.
This time they focused on this extraordinary heatwave, which is expected to keep pushing temperatures higher for several more days across parts of the continent. The link between the rise in such extreme heat events worldwide — both in frequency and intensity — and human-caused climate change is well documented in dozens of studies. What WWA researchers, led by Theodore Keeping of the Environmental Policy Centre at Imperial College London, have done now is quantify how much global warming contributed to this specific episode, which has left a trail of temperature records across Europe.
These scientists conclude that just half a century ago, in 1976, a heatwave of this intensity would have been “virtually impossible to occur in June, while also highly unlikely at any time of the year.”
A similar heatwave in June would have been about 3.5°C (38.3ºF) cooler during the day in 1976. The nighttime temperatures would have been about 2.4°C (36.3ºF) cooler in June 1976, adds the report.
The authors ran the same analysis for 2003, when Europe experienced the first major heatwave of this century. They concluded that, had it occurred 23 years ago, daytime temperatures would have been about 2°C (35.6ºF) cooler and about 1.3°C (34.3ºF) cooler during the night.
“This event would not have been possible in June without climate change,” Keeping emphasizes. The study also rules out any meaningful influence from El Niño, which has just begun.
Keeping explains that June in many parts of western Europe is the month that “is warming fastest.” That translates into an earlier onset of heatwaves.
“Europe’s savage heatwave has the fingerprints of the climate crisis all over it,” Simon Stiell, the U.N.’s climate chief, said in a statement, recalling the need for the global economy to move away from fossil fuels to avoid deepening the problem. “Climate change is spiraling out of control because of the world’s addiction to burning coal, oil and gas,” he added.
That is why, Stiell stressed, “the solutions are equally clear: a faster shift to renewables – which are now much cheaper than fossil fuels – as well as protecting forests and boosting climate resilience.” Otherwise, impacts from these kinds of extreme events will increase.
Heatwaves have a direct impact on health, especially among the most vulnerable groups, such as older people. Hans Henri P. Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, said a week ago that heatwaves “are now a recurring crisis inflicting suffering, claiming lives and fracturing our health systems and infrastructure.” He recalled that in just the last four years heat has claimed more than 200,000 lives in Europe. But those deaths are only “the tip of the iceberg, with millions more people being affected physically and mentally.”
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