The record-breaking heatwave that has baked Siberia聽for the past six months was made at least 600 times more likely because of climate change, which researchers say mean it is 鈥渆ffectively impossible鈥� for it to have occurred without the warming driven by human activities.
Temperatures in the region have been around 8掳C above average since the start of the year, triggering wildfires that and a permafrost thaw that contributed to .
狈辞飞,听 by an international team of climate scientists, which ran computer models of a world with and without the 1掳C of warming that has occurred over the past two centuries, has found that humanity鈥檚 greenhouse gas emissions were almost certainly the culprit.
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The researchers estimated that the temperature anomalies across the region between January and June could have been made up to 99,000 times more likely because of climate change. However, Friederike Otto at the University of Oxford says the team has more confidence on the lower bound of at least 600 times more likely.
Striking heat
The increased probability is one of the clearest signals of human-caused global warming so far in the field of attribution science, which assesses whether heatwaves and other extreme weather can be plausibly linked to climate change. 鈥淭his is actually among the strongest results of any attribution study so far,鈥� says Sarah Kew at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.
Even for a part of the world marked by big natural swings in temperatures, Siberia鈥檚 recent heat has been striking. The team found that the area would have been at least 2掳C cooler without humanity鈥檚 influence.
While confident about the temperature anomalies across Siberia as a whole, the researchers didn鈥檛 have enough certainty to say the extent to which the record-breaking high of 38掳C recorded in the town of Verkhoyansk on one day in June聽was linked to climate change.
The study isn鈥檛 yet published in a journal. It was carried out by researchers at the World Weather Attribution initiative, which has previously linked Australia鈥檚 2019 to 2020 bushfires and the 2019 European summer heatwave to climate change.
