Europe’s worst heatwave would have been impossible without climate change

This is the third time in five years that Europe finds itself in the grip of an intense heatwave. Similar scenes were witnessed in 2022 and 2023 as well. More than 1,00,000 people are estimated to have died owing to extreme heat in those two years.

While the current episode of extreme heat is expected to slightly subside from this weekend, according to forecasts by meteorological offices of UK and France, Europe’s ordeal might not be over yet. Historically, June has not been the hottest month for Europe. July is. With the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean expected to get stronger in July, Europe might be staring at fresh heatwave spells in the coming weeks.

Climate change-driven heatwave

The WWA study, however, was categorical in assigning the cause of this heatwave. It said it was not because of El Niño, which is still to reach its peak, or any other reason, but climate change.

“Both the daytime highs and overnight temperatures seen during this heatwave would have been virtually impossible to occur at this time of year as recently as 1976 – just 50 years ago,” it said.

A map of Europe’s heatwave hotspots, prepared by World Weather Attribution.

Many of the temperature records now being broken in Europe were set in 1976, when the region had experienced an unusually hot summer.

Europe experienced its first heatwave of this century in 2003. The study said the 2003 heatwave was nothing in comparison to what the region is witnessing now. The record-breaking high temperatures during the night are almost 100 times more likely today than they were in 2003, it said. The day-time peak temperatures observed during the current spell are almost ten times more likely.

Day-time temperatures in most of Europe, barring the northern part, are usually between 20 and 30 degrees Celsius during the month of June. Night time temperatures typically vary between 11 and 17 degrees Celsius. But in many parts of the region, peak temperatures in the ongoing heatwave have been 10 to 15 degrees Celsius higher than normal. A similar situation had prevailed in May this year as well, when an early heatwave had prevailed in Europe.

“The analysis found that the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phase had no role in driving the heat (in this spell),” the study said.

ENSO is an ocean atmospheric interaction over the Pacific Ocean region. El Niño is one of the two phases of ENSO and is known to have a warming effect on the planet. Its opposite phase, La Niña, tends to bring the temperatures down.

Why accurate attribution is important

Though the intensity of this particular spell of European heatwave, and the trend of the last few years, had made the imprint of climate change fairly clear, scientists are usually wary of linking any individual extreme weather event to climate change without an attribution study like this.

Climate attribution science is a relatively new discipline, developed just over the last two decades. It tries to examine the likelihood of a particular extreme weather event happening if climate change was not taking place.

Earlier, it used to take scientists a couple of months, even years, to make this assessment. But in the last three to four years, mainly owing to the efforts of WWA, a much faster assessment has been made possible, sometimes even when the event is still ongoing, as in the present case.

Attribution science seeks to remove ambiguity and determine the exact extent of responsibility of climate change in causing major extreme weather events.

In the last few years, it has established the footprints of climate change on several events. Besides preparing scientific evidence, this exercise is also aimed at forcing policy and decision makers to act more rapidly on climate change.

Action awaited

The scientific evidence on climate change is already voluminous and compelling. Still, climate change seems to have dropped a few notches down in the list of global priorities, particularly after Donald Trump took office as US President. The recent G7 meetings, for example, hardly had any climate-related agenda or outcome. A few years earlier, climate change used to be one of the most important items at such international meetings, especially those involving influential leaders.

Scientists insist that there is still time for countries to take rapid actions and attempt to achieve the Paris Agreement targets of containing the global rise of temperatures within 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times. But governments appear to have all but given up on those targets. For them, it seems, these targets have already gone beyond reach, or require the kind of mobilisation of resources on a global scale that is neither practical nor realistic to organise.

Countries seem to have decided to let climate change play itself out and do their best to deal with its impact and adapt to it, a strategy scientists routinely warn against. Adaptation has its limits, they maintain.

But global action on climate change has continued to woefully lag behind global warming. Events such as the European heatwave are only expected to increase both in frequency as well as intensity.