A sweltering Santa Marija lies ahead
A sweltering Santa Marija week is expected, with the Met Office forecasting hot weather throughout the traditional shutdown week.
The Met Office forecast for next week indicates a constant temperature of 40 degrees Celsius (hovering between an actual temperature of 35°C and 36°C), at least between Sunday and Wednesday, the eve of the holiday.
The ‘feels like’ temperature for these three days – Thursday, Friday and Saturday – will be 39 degrees Celsius before rising by one degree on Sunday.
The heat wave smashing temperature records in Western Europe has been exasperated by anthropogenic climate change, according to a study published last week.
The study, carried out by a respected team of European scientists, should be a warning of things to come, its lead author says.
“What will be the impacts on agriculture? What will the impacts on water [be]?” said Robert Vautard of the Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace in France. “This will put [real] tension [on] society that we may not be so well-equipped to cope with.”
The report concludes that the heatwave late last month “was so extreme over continental Western Europe that the observed magnitudes would have been extremely unlikely without climate change.”
In countries where millions of people sweltered through the heat wave, temperatures would have been 1.5 to three degrees Celsius lower in a world without human-induced climate change, the study says.
Global warming is also making such extreme heat more frequent, the study by experts from France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Germany has found.
They say that the record temperatures recorded in France and the Netherlands could happen every 50-150 years in the world’s current climate. Without “human influence on climate,” the temperatures would likely happen less than once in 1,000 years.
According to Vautard, Europe needs to get used to such heat waves, which are likely to become more frequent and intense.
“This will go up and if we don’t do anything about climate change, about emissions. These heat waves which today have an amplitude of 42 degrees, will [be] three degrees [higher] in 2050, so that [will be] 45 (degrees), roughly speaking,” he told The
While the heat wave broke in Western Europe, the extreme temperatures have since shifted north and are causing massive ice melts in Greenland and the Arctic.
The scientists calculated the odds of this type of heat occurring and how often it would have happened in a world without humanmade global warming and compared them. They created the simulations by using eight different sets of complex computer models.
The US National Academy of Sciences in 2016 studied this new scientific method of climate attribution and pronounced it valid.
Kathie Dello, a climate scientist from NC State University in North Carolina, said the study helped pin the blame for the heat wave on climate change.
“If searching for a culprit for the intensity of these recent European heatwaves, climate change is the obvious culprit,” Dello said in an email. “Attribution is just dusting for fingerprints. Climate change will continue to be a menace when it comes to extreme heat, making these events more likely and more intense.”
Another expert not connected to the study, Celine Bonfils, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said the findings are clear: “Record hot weather events are becoming more likely, and human-induced climate change is causing this increase in heat wave frequency.”
The new report agreed with their assessments, saying that every recent European heat wave that analysed “was found to be made much more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change.”