Climate scientists said Monday that global warming has made the heat wave that smothered Pakistan and India this spring hotter and more likely to occur.
The chances of a heat wave increased by at least 30 times since the 19th century, before widespread emissions of planet-warming gases began. The heat wave on average is 1 degree Celsius hotter than a similar event would have been in those preindustrial times.
Friederike Otto is a climate scientist at Imperial College London.
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The study found that a heat wave like this one has a 1 in 100 chance of happening every year. Warming would have had a chance of at least 1 in 3,000. If the world reaches 2 degrees Celsius of warming, as it is on track to do, the chances would increase to as much as 1 in 5. The world has warmed 1.1 degrees since the 19th century.
South Asia is no stranger to heat this time of year, but this heat wave began early, near the beginning of March, and is continuing in some areas where little relief is expected until monsoon rains arrive over the next few months.
The maximum temperatures for March and April were analyzed by the scientists and they used simulations of a fictional world where emissions and warming never occurred. The model-comparison techniques used in this study have been peer-reviewed in the past and are now widely used.
The researchers said that because of the lack of a long observational record and other uncertainties, the findings are conservative, and the chances of such an event are likely more than 30 times greater than they were before warming began.
The analysis looked at the effects of the heat. Arpita Mondal, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai and an author of the study, said gathering data about the effects on wheat, a crop that is sensitive to extreme heat, was difficult despite anecdotal reports of damage.
India has banned wheat exports to the rest of the world, which has affected agricultural productivity.
International agencies are concerned about the potential of a global food shortage because of the ban and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The effects of this heat wave tend to fall on the poor, according to Roop Singh, a climate risk adviser with the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.
There is an investment in clean energy. A $242 million effort to promote clean energy in developing countries was announced by the billionaire Michael R. The money will be used to fund programs in Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Turkey and Vietnam.
Hurricanes and pollution. The study found that particulate air pollution has a significant effect on hurricanes. Over the past four decades, the decline in air pollution in North America and Europe was associated with a rise in the number of hurricanes; increasing pollution from growing economies had the opposite effect.
She said there have been reports of widespread power failures because of the need for more cooling and because of a coal shortage in India.
The findings of the study are in line with other analyses of similar events over the past two decades, including an extraordinary heat wave last summer in the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada. The field of research, called Attribution analysis, has contributed to a growing understanding among scientists and the public that the damaging effects of global warming are already occurring.
The link between heat waves and climate change is clear because emissions have raised the world's baseline temperature. Climate change is usually only one factor in studies of other extreme events.
In a recent paper, Dr. Otto and others argued that the influence of global warming on heat waves is now so apparent that it is an obsolete question.
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