BRUSSELS: Europe is once again battling scorching temperatures this summer, with wildfires blazing across the continent from the Mediterranean to Spain. Here's how climate change drives these events. HOTTER, MORE FREQUENT HEATWAVES Climate change makes heatwaves hotter and more frequent. T
BRUSSELS: Europe is once again battling scorching temperatures this summer, with wildfires blazing across the continent from the Mediterranean to Spain. Here's how climate change drives these events.Climate change makes heatwaves hotter and more frequent. This is the case for most land regions, and has been confirmed by the United Nations' global panel of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
But other conditions affect heatwaves too. In Europe, atmospheric circulation is an important factor.To find out exactly how much climate change affected a specific heatwave, scientists conduct"attribution studies". Since 2004, more than 400 such studies have been done for extreme weather events, including heat, floods and drought - calculating how much of a role climate change played in each.
On average on land, heat extremes that would have happened once every 10 years without human influence on the climate are now three times more frequent, according to ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne. A heatwave that occurred once per decade in the pre-industrial era would happen 4.1 times a decade at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, and 5.6 times at 2 degrees Celsius, the IPCC says.
In the Mediterranean, that has contributed to the fire season starting earlier and burning more land. Fires burning since mid-July on the island of Rhodes forced the evacuation of some 20,000 people as an inferno reached resorts and coastal villages on the island's southeast.Hotter, drier conditions make fires far more dangerous, according to Copernicus senior scientist Mark Parrington.
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