If you suffered during the recent record-smashing heatwave across Europe, there鈥檚 bad news. Such heatwaves are the new normal for countries like the UK, and we can expect even more extreme ones in the next few years, say climate scientists who have studied the event.
鈥淧eople say, oh this is historic and this will make history,鈥� says Friederike Otto of Oxford University in the UK. 鈥淚t will probably not make history because we should expect that these records will be broken in the next few years.鈥�
Otto and her colleagues have used computer models to assess how global warming has altered the odds of heatwaves like the July heatwave in Europe, during which new all-time high records were set in the UK, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Only the UK remained below 40掳C.
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The team鈥檚 overall conclusion is that temperatures in all locations would have been between 1.5 and 3掳C cooler had the event had happened in preindustrial times. It鈥檚 extremely unlikely that France and the Netherlands would have experienced such a heatwave at all without global warming. It would be expected to happen less than once in every 1000 years.
鈥淓very heatwave analysed so far in Europe in recent years was found to be made much more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change,鈥� states the study. 鈥淭he July 2019 heatwave was so extreme over continental Western Europe that the observed magnitudes would have been extremely unlikely without climate change.鈥�
For the UK and Germany, the heatwave was not quite as unlikely. It could have happened around once every 100 years in a preindustrial climate. The bad news is that in today鈥檚 warmer climate, such heatwaves are now expected to occur around once every 8 years.
And with the world still warming, it is becoming ever more likely that similar or even hotter heatwaves will occur.
Globally, , according to the World Meteorological Organization and Copernicus Climate Change Programme.
鈥淛uly has re-written climate history, with dozens of new temperature records at local, national and global level,鈥� said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement.
The hot air that caused the European heatwave has now moved over Greenland, causing near-record levels of surface melting. Meanwhile, forest fires continue to rage across Siberia, Alaska and Canada, prompting Russia to declare a state of emergency.
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