![]() Read more stories on climate issues by The Associated Press at įollow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. “But you ain’t seen nothing yet,” he added. “I’ve been in a lot of hot places in the world, and this was the worst I’ve ever been in. “Victoria, which is known for its mild climate, felt more like Death Valley last week,” Weaver said. The study hit home for University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn’t part of the research team. The models also underestimate how dry soil worsens heat because there is less water to evaporate, which feeds a vicious cycle of drought, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA and the Nature Conservancy. That’s because climate models used in the simulations usually underestimate how climate change alters the jet stream that parks “heat domes” over regions and causes some heat waves, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. ![]() Six outside scientists said the quick study made sense and probably underestimated the extent of climate change’s role in the heat wave. But sometimes the team finds climate change wasn’t a factor, as they did in a Brazilian drought and a heat wave in India. In the past, they have found similar large climate change effects in many heat waves, including ones in Europe and Siberia. The World Weather Attribution team does these quick analyses, which later get published in peer-reviewed journals. The big question for many people is: Could this also happen in a lot of places?” And we feel that we do not understand heat waves as well as we thought we did. “This is something that nobody saw coming, that nobody thought possible. “Everybody is really worried about the implications of this event,” said study co-author Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a Dutch climate scientist. Scientists say this hints that some kind of larger climate shift could be in play - and in places that they didn’t expect. What made the Northwest heat wave so remarkable is how much hotter it was than old records and what climate models had predicted. “Without climate change this event would not have happened,” said study senior author Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford. The difference between the two scenarios is the climate change portion. They then simulated a world without greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. They logged observations of what happened and fed them into 21 computer models and ran numerous simulations. The team of scientists used a well-established and credible method to search for climate change’s role in extreme weather, according to the National Academy of Sciences. In Oregon alone, the state medical examiner on Wednesday reported 116 deaths related to the heat wave. She said it will be many months before a death toll can be calculated from June’s blast of heat but it’s likely to be hundreds or thousands. “This study is telling us climate change is killing people,” said Ebi, who endured the blistering heat in Seattle. Those few degrees make a big difference in human health, said study co-author Kristie Ebi, a professor at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington. The study also found that in the Pacific Northwest and Canada climate change was responsible for about 3.6 degrees (2 degrees Celsius) of the heat shock. This type of extreme heat “would go from essentially virtually impossible to relatively commonplace,” said study co-author Gabriel Vecchi, a Princeton University climate scientist.
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