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Southeastern
Australia has suffered through a series of brutal heat waves over the
past two months, with temperatures reaching a scorching 113 degrees
Fahrenheit in some parts of the state of New South Wales.
“It was nothing short of awful,” said Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, of the Climate Change Research Center
at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. “In Australia, we’re
used to a little bit of heat. But this was at another level.”
So
Dr. Perkins-Kirkpatrick, who studies climate extremes, did what comes
naturally: She looked to see whether there was a link between the heat
and human-driven climate change.
Her analysis, conducted with a loose-knit group of researchers called World Weather Attribution,
was made public on Thursday. Their conclusion was that climate change
made maximum temperatures like those seen in January and February at
least 10 times more likely than a century ago, before significant
greenhouse gas emissions from human activity started warming the planet.
Looked
at another way, that means that the kind of soaring temperatures
expected to occur in New South Wales once every 500 years on average now
may occur once every 50 years. What is more, the researchers found that
if climate change continued unabated, such maximum temperatures may
occur on average every five years.
For
the overall 2016-17 summer in New South Wales, the researchers say,
climate change made the hot average temperatures — which set records for
the state — at least 50 times more likely than in the past.
The
findings are the latest in what has become a growing field: studies
that try to assess the influence of climate change on extreme weather as
soon as possible. The idea is to offer scientific analyses of heat
waves, floods and other events while people are still talking about
them, and to counter the spread of misinformation, intentional or not,
about the impact of global warming.
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