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Scientists: Heat wave made 5 times more likely by climate change

Last week’s record breaking heat wave across much of Europe was made “at least five times” more likely to happen by climate change, say scientists.

Their rapid attribution study says that rising temperatures “super-charged” the event, making it more likely to happen than through natural variability alone.

Heat waves in June are now about 4C hotter than they used to be, the researchers said.

Temperatures in France reached an all time high of 45.9C last Friday.

Heat waves naturally occur in summertime but last week’s event in many European countries was unprecedented because it happened so early, and the recorded temperatures were so high.

Records were broken at locations in France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Spain.

The new French record, established at Gallargues-le-Montueux, was more than 1.5C above the previous high mark.

Much of the concern about the heat focused on France, with red alerts in several areas, many schools were closed, exams were postponed and health minister Agnès Buzyn warned that “everyone is at risk”.

The immediate cause of the heat wave was the weather, with hot air drawn in from northern Africa, caused by high pressure over central Europe and a storm stalling over the Atlantic.

By lucky coincidence, the authors of this new study happened to be in Toulouse, France, at a conference on climate change and extreme events.

The researchers, members of the World Weather Attribution Group decided to use the opportunity to analyse the link between human-induced climate change and the heat wave.

They defined the heat wave as the highest three-day averaged daily mean temperature in June, arguing that this is a better indicator of health impacts than maximums or minimums.

The researchers compared the observations of temperatures recorded during the month of June with climate models that can show how the world would be without the human influence on the climate.

They found that, over France, the probability of having a heat wave had increased by at least a factor of five. However, the researchers say that this influence could be much higher still, by a factor of 100 or more.

“We are very confident that this lower boundary of factor five is valid – but we are not confident we can say much more than that,” said Dr Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. –BBC

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