Vancouver (dpa) – The extreme heat of the past few days in western North America with temperatures of almost 50 degrees would have been virtually impossible without climate change, according to a study.
According to a high-level international group of climate researchers, global warming caused by greenhouse gases made the heat wave in Canada and the United States 150 times more likely. However, the study by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project has not yet been published in any specialist journal.
The scientists compared temperatures in late June and early July with historical data since 1800. In doing so, they concluded that the heat wave, even given current advances in climate change, was an event that is likely to happen only one in 1,000 years . “The statistical equivalent of real bad luck,” as one message says. The participating researcher Friederike Otto from the University of Oxford said: “What we see is unprecedented. It is not normal for heat records to be broken by four or five degrees Celsius ».
Canada in particular, but also the northwest of the USA, had been hit by an unprecedented heat in the past few weeks. Around 260 kilometers northeast of Vancouver, 49.6 degrees were measured in the Canadian community of Lytton – the record in Canada had previously been 45 degrees. A few days later, the village was almost completely destroyed in an inferno. In the province of British Columbia, over 700 sudden and unexpected deaths were also reported within a week.
The researchers emphasize that it seems very unlikely, but not impossible, that there could be another reason for the heat in addition to coincidence coupled with global warming: namely that climate change has reached a threshold that has not yet been reached Extreme weather phenomena considered possible to pile up by leaps and bounds. However, the data collected have not yet indicated this.
According to the study, the extraordinary events could only be a foretaste of the future in northern latitudes such as Germany: Global warming of two degrees Celsius, which with current emissions would be reached in a few decades, could be events like the heat in North America instead of on average Let it happen once in 1000 years every five to ten years.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210708-99-300151 / 3
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