Scientists said Wednesday that global warming has made it more likely that there will be severe droughts like this summer in Europe, North America and China. The burning of fossil fuels is threatening food, water and electricity supplies around the world.
The main driver of this year's dry spell was the heat in the Northern Hemisphere. The scientists said that the high average temperatures would have been impossible without greenhouse gas emissions.
The scientists found that soil conditions in the north of the tropics have a 1-in-20 chance of happening each year. The exact size of the increase had a wide possible range because of the challenges involved in estimating soil moisture at a global scale.
According to the science, we are already seeing the fingerprints of climate change in many of these countries and regions.
Sign up for the Climate Forward newsletter Your must-read guide to the climate crisis.Dr. van Aalst said that the impacts are clear.
Extreme summer dryness that ravages crops, cripples river commerce and strains hydropower generation across so much of the planet would be a huge problem on its own. Russia's war in Ukraine is one of the reasons why global food and energy prices are rising.
In May, record heat smothered Europe, and roasting temperatures dried out rivers and caused fires for a long time. Estimates show that the heat may have killed 11,000 people in France and 8,000 in Germany. In the European Union, summer fires burned a larger area than the average over the last 15 years.
According to the country's meteorological authority, China had its most brutal summer since modern records began in 1961. China increased its contribution to global warming by digging up and burning more coal.
In the United States, nearly half of the lower 48 states experienced moderate to extreme dry weather this summer. There are parts of the Southwest and California that are stuck in a 20-year-plus megadrOUGHT.
Scientists use computer simulations to look at both the real-world climate and an alternate climate in which humans hadn't burned fossil fuels for more than a century. They can see the severity of weather events in both worlds. The difference suggests how much global warming was to blame.
Climate change probably worsened this summer's devastating floods in Pakistan, which have killed 1,600 people, damaged two million homes and submerged large swaths of farmland, according to scientists with World Weather Attribution. They found that global warming made Britain's record-breaking July heat wave hotter and more likely to happen.
Hot spells are easier to study than dry spells. They aren't the only factors that affect them. Landscape features also play a part. While sensor technologies are constantly improving, estimating the amount of water in the soil across large areas is hard to do reliably.
The entire Northern Hemisphere north of the tropics and a swath of continental Europe from France to Ukraine were looked at in the report. They looked at the weather this summer in both areas.
The scientists found that because the planet has warmed by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, this summer's low water levels in the first few feet below the soil's surface were a result.
The author of the study said that this summer's dry spell is a "relatively frequent occurrence" in the current climate. She said that if the globe warms to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, it will become an additional 15 times as likely.
It would happen every year, every other year, more or less.
Global warming increased the chances of this summer being dry in Western and Central Europe. They said this doesn't mean Europe is less affected by climate change than other parts of the northern hemisphere. Friederike Otto is a scientist at Imperial College London and one of the study authors.
Dr. Otto said that climate change was a big part of the story. When we look at heavy precipitation, the exact quantification of that role is less certain.
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