LONDON - A new study has found that the heatwaves and wildfires that caused devastation in Europe this summer would not have happened without global warming.
Researchers found that for almost all of the past 150 years, the expected frequency of a European summer as hot as 2021 was no higher than once every 10,000 years.
But since the 1990s, as carbon emissions continued to soar, the expected frequency has reached once every three years. Nikos Christidis, who led the analysis on behalf of the Met Office, said: “These kinds of results are no longer surprising.
Climate change is already making our weather extremes more severe.”
Urban areas are feeling the effects of climate change while simultaneously contributing to the increasing severity of the world’s worsening environmental situation, the UN has warned.
“Urban activities” are a “key contributor to climate change” due to the high level of greenhouse gas emissions they generate, the UN Environment Programme has said. And as natural disasters increase in frequency and severity as a result of rising global temperatures, cities that had previously not been thought of as the frontline of the climate crisis have begun to experience extreme, and in some cases deadly, weather events.
A research team, led by Professor Lei Zhao, an environmental engineering expert at the University of Illinois, found that average summer temperatures could rise between 1.9C and 4.4C by the end of the century. “No matter how much the world warms, cities will have it worse,” said Bloomberg.
