Human induced climate change likely to have caused current heat wave

According to reports by The Guardian and BBC Online, the current heatwave in Europe was made more than twice as likely by climate change caused by human behavior.

At the moment, Europe, as well as many other parts of the world, is being exposed to an extreme heat wave causing crop failures, drought and severe forest fires from the South up to the Polar Circle. The last major heatwave troubled Europe in 2003 and claimed about 70,000 people’s lives. Back then, scientists already connected this event to climate change called forth by manhood. However, BBC Online writes that researchers now inferred that the 2003 heatwave was made 500% more likely because of climate change. Moreover, scientists name more extreme weather events which were made more probable by human induced climate change, such as Hurricane Harvey in the US 2017, heatwave Lucifer in Southern Europe in 2017 as well as storms like Eleonor and Friederike in Western Europe in January 2017.

Extreme weather much more likely in the future

According to climate researchers, the current results are still preliminary. However, they also underline that the signs of climate change are clear and predicting even worse extreme weather events than the current for the future – probably returning in heatwave periods within every 5-10 years as an example. Towards The Guardian, Dr Friederike Otto, from the University of Oxford and part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA), stated: “The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer, and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common.”

“The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer, and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common.” - Dr Friederike Otto, University of Oxford

In an interview with the Berliner Zeitung, climate researcher Mojib Latif calls for courageous climate protection in order to mitigate severe impacts of climate change, like crop failures resulting in famines and the destruction of the environment by extreme weather events, as well as to combat causes of flight. Moreover, he demands the civil society to take action against climate change, as Trump denies climate change and even Germany, under the lead of the once so-called “climate chancellor” Angela Merkel, seems to have lost sight of the urgency to fight climate change.

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