Heat Waves Around the World Push People and Nations ‘To the Edge’

Millions of Americans are in danger of dying. The hot air blanketed Europe last weekend, causing parts of France and Spain to feel like they are in the summer. Heavy rains caused flooding in the southern part of the country. The start of the monsoon rains brought some relief to places in India that were experiencing extraordinary heat.

It is too early to say if climate change is to blame for the heat waves in these four powerhouse economies, which are the top emitters of heat-trapping gases.

While global warming is making extreme heat more common worldwide, deeper analysis is needed to tell scientists whether specific weather events were made more likely or more intense because of human-generated warming. Climate change has made the heat in India 30 times more likely to occur, according to a team of researchers.

For reasons related to the jet stream and other rivers of air that influence weather systems around the world, concurrent heat waves seem to be hitting certain groups of far flung places.

There are studies showing that parts of North America, Europe and Asia are related. As the planet warms further, scientists are still trying to figure out how these patterns might change, but for now it means simultaneous heat extremes will continue affecting these places where so much of the world's economic activity is concentrated.

The atmospheric circulation pattern that allows the heat to accumulate is needed in order to have a heat wave. He said, "We are definitely getting more heat." He said that climate change may be affecting the way the heat is distributed around the world.

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There are simultaneous weather extremes in many places. Illness and death can be caused by individual heat waves. Because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, global food supplies have been under a lot of stress.

Scientists no longer think that climate change is making heat waves worse. Soon, the world's most devastating heat waves may simply have no historical analogue from the time shortly before humans started pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, some scientists argue.

Andrew Dessler is a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

If the threshold for a heat wave is just the mercury exceeding 100 degrees for days in a row, then it's "not at all unexpected" Every land area in the mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere would be above 100 degrees by the end of the century due to global warming.

Scientists find a big increase in the frequencies of simultaneous heat waves when they look at how often temperatures exceed a certain level.

Between the 1980s and the 2010s, the average number of days with at least one large heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere doubled. The number of days with two or more heat waves grew from 20 to 73. From May to September, that's nearly every day.

The study found that the 2010s were more intense than the 1980s and that the concurrent heat waves affected larger areas. 3.6 large heat waves happen per day on average when there is at least one large heat wave in the Northern Hemisphere.

Deepti Singh is a climate scientist at Washington State University and an author of the study.

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Dr. Singh and her co-authors looked at where concurrent heat waves happened the most. It was found that large simultaneous heat waves hit parts of eastern North America, Europe, and central and eastern Asia more often between 1979 and 2019.

She said that the study didn't try to predict whether heat waves along this pattern will become more frequent.

Scientists are trying to figure out how the meandering of the jet stream might change in a warming era. The difference in temperatures between the north and south of the Northern Hemisphere is narrowed by the rapid warming of theArctic. It's not clear how this might affect extreme weather.

The winds that drive weather systems around the planet are driven by the temperature differences. The air currents may be slowing down as the temperature difference narrows. Extreme events such as heat waves and heavy rains are likely to last longer.

The longer a heat wave lasts, the more systems are pushed to the edge.

He said that climate change will cause more extreme weather events. He said that the circulation changes would act on top of it and make extreme events more frequent.