Exceptionally hot weather predicted until 2022 — study
PARIS (AFP) — Man-made global warming and a natural surge in Earth’s surface temperature will join forces to make the next five years exceptionally hot, according to a study published on Tuesday.
The double whammy of climate change and so-called natural variability more than doubles the likelihood of “extreme warm events” in ocean surface waters, creating a dangerous breeding ground for hurricanes and typhoons, they reported in Nature Communications.
“This warm phase is reinforcing longterm climate change,” said lead author Florian Sevellec, a climate scientist at the University of Brest in France.
“This particular phase is expected to continue for at least five years.”
Earth’s average surface temperature has always fluctuated.
Over the last million years, it vacillated roughly every 100,000 years between ice ages and balmy periods warmer than today.
Over the last 11,000 years, those variations have become extremely modest, allowing our species to flourish.
Man-made climate change — caused by billions of tons of greenhouse gases injected into the atmosphere, mainly over the last century — has come on top of those small shifts, and today threatens to overwhelm them.
Teasing apart the influence of carbon pollution and natural variation has long bedevilled scientists trying to quantify the impact of climate change on cyclones, droughts, floods and other forms of extreme weather.
Sevellec and his colleagues tackled the problem in a different way.