Scientists: The extreme heatwaves in Europe would not be possible without climate change

According to The Guardian, a group of scientists is saying that without climate change the recent intense heatwaves in Europe would not be possible. It says, “The new analysis by scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium shows how rapidly extreme heat is worsening as carbon pollution continues to pile up in the atmosphere. As recently as 2003, a heatwave like the current one in Europe would have been 2C cooler due to the lower level of global heating at the time. In 1976, another famous heatwave year, it would have been 3.5C cooler.” The WWA is essentially a group of prominent scientists that assesses, in real time, the contribution of climate change to individual climate-related disasters; it publishes periodic reports.

But the WWA findings about the effects of carbon dioxide on the world’s climate are not new; for more than a decade the United Nations agencies, as well as the Paris Agreement, have been proclaiming that the activities of human beings have been emitting the carbon dioxide that forms the majority of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and a failure to reverse this trend will progressively lead to global climate disasters. In response to the WWA report, The Guardian quotes the secretary of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as saying, “’Climate change is running rampant, caused by the world’s addiction to burning coal, oil and gas. But the solutions are equally clear: a faster shift to clean energy—which is now much cheaper than fossil fuels—as well as protecting forests and building climate resilience.'” The UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement are discussed elsewhere.