This Summer’s Heat Waves Could Be The Strongest Climate Signal Yet

InsideCimate News - Bob Berwyn

'In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future.' 

Extreme heat killed more than 80 people in Japan in July, just a few weeks after flooding from downpours was blamed for more than 200 deaths there. Martin Bureau/Getty Images

Earth's global warming fever spiked to deadly new highs across the Northern Hemisphere this summer, and we're feeling the results—extreme heat is now blamed for hundreds of deaths, droughts threaten food supplies, wildfires have raced through neighborhoods in the western United States, Greece and as far north as the Arctic Circle.
At sea, record and near-record warm oceans have sent soggy masses of air surging landward, fueling extreme rainfall and flooding in Japan and the eastern U.S. In Europe, the Baltic Sea is so warm that potentially toxic blue-green algae is spreading across its surface.
There shouldn't be any doubt that some of the deadliest of this summer's disasters—including flooding in Japan and wildfires in Greece—are fueled by weather extremes linked to global warming, said Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.
"We know very well that global warming is making heat waves longer, hotter and more frequent," she said.
"The evidence from having extreme events around the world is really compelling. It's very indicative that the global warming background is causing or at least contributing to these events," she said.

The challenges created by global warming are becoming evident even in basic infrastructure, much of which was built on the assumption of a cooler climate. In these latest heat waves, railroad tracks have bent in the rising temperatures, airport runways have cracked, and power plants from France to Finland have had to power down because their cooling sources became too warm.
"We're seeing that many things are not built to withstand the heat levels we are seeing now," Le Quéré said.
Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann said this summer's extreme weather fits into a pattern he identified with other researchers in a study published last year. The jet stream's north-south meanders have been unusually stationary, leading to persistent heat waves and droughts in some areas and days of rain and flooding in others, he said. "Our work last year shows that this sort of pattern ... has become more common because of human-caused climate change, and in particular, amplified Arctic warming."

Deadly Heat Waves from Canada to Japan 
There are many ways to define a heat wave, but the conditions in many areas of the planet this summer have been universally recognized as severe, said Boram Lee, a senior research scientist with the World Meteorological Organization.
"From around end of June, many countries in Europe, Asia and North America have issued severe warnings," she said. The UK, U.S., Japan and Korea all had long-lasting warnings, and Japan declared the recent heat wave a natural disaster, she added.
In Europe, scientists on Friday released a real-time attribution study of the heat wave that has baked parts of northern Europe since June. They found that global warming caused by greenhouse gas pollution made the ongoing heat wave five times more likely in Denmark, and twice as likely in Ireland.

In El Salvador, many farmers have lost their lost corn crops to drought this summer. Agriculture is suffering in the high heat and dry conditions in several parts of the world. Credit: Oscar Rivera/AFP/Getty Images

"Near the Arctic, it's absolutely exceptional and unprecedented. This is a warning," said French heat wave expert Robert Vautard, who worked on the study for World Weather Attribution. The group previously determined that global warming made last summer's "Lucifer" heat wave in southern Europe 10 times more likely.
"In many places, people are preparing for the past or present climate. But this summer is the future," he said.
The geographic scope and persistence of the European heat wave stands out. An area stretching from the British Isles to Eastern Europe and north to the Arctic is bright red on European heat wave and drought maps, covering an area about as big as Texas and California combined.
Crop damage is being reported in parts Norway through Sweden, Denmark and the Baltics. Depending on conditions during the next month, more widespread crop failures could raise global food prices.

In mid-July, temperatures reached all-time record highs above the Arctic Circle, around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and hovered in the 80s for weeks at a time. In the Norwegian glacier area that Lars Holger Pilø studies, the average temperature has been 9 degrees Fahrenheit above average for the past 30 days.
"I have been working here since 2006, and we have snow records going back 60 years, and there's nothing like what we're seeing right now," said Pilø, part of team of ice archaeologists who are measuring the snow and ice loss and recovering historic artifacts like arrowheads and skis that were buried for millennia.
"I'm watching with a mixture of excitement and dread. I try not to think too much about it and stick to what we do, which is rescuing the artifacts coming out of the warming. I call it dark archaeology," he said. "I look at the ice and I think, dead man walking."
Norwegian Meteorological Institute climate scientist Ketil Isaksen said the extreme situation in Scandinavia fits with the pattern of global warming.
"There are so many extremes now from all over the world. We're seeing a very common pattern. For me this is a strong climate signal. Ice that's several thousand years old, melting in the matter of just a few weeks," he said.
Isaksen is finalizing some studies that find heat is penetrating between 30 and 50 meters deep into the ground through cracks in the rocky mountains around Norway's fjords. Instead of just a thin skin of permafrost melting, those mountains could fall apart in large chunks when autumn rains start, threatening coastal communities with tsunamis.
"Now we have a new extreme this summer. This will probably affect slope stability, and we can expect mass movement events like debris flows and landslides in late summer," he said.
He said the studies help define new geologic hazard areas with knowledge that some of the melted mountains will see wholesale slope failure when strong rains hit. Based on the information, emergency managers are developing new early warning systems.

The Increasing Influence of Global Warming
About the same time the Norwegian researchers were uncovering ancient tools in the Arctic tundra this summer, heat records were being set in many other parts of the world.
Temperatures in Algeria reached 124 degrees Fahrenheit, setting a record for the African continent. A few weeks earlier, a city in Oman is believed to have broken a global record when it went more than 24 hours with temperatures never falling below 108 degrees. Japan set a national record of 106 amid a heat wave that has been blamed for more than 80 deaths.
Regional western heat events are becoming so pronounced that some climate scientists see the current extremes in the U.S. as a climate inflection point, where the global warming signal stands out above the natural background of climate variability.

In mid-July, a week of temperatures in the high 80s and up to 96 degrees Fahrenheit in normally cool Quebec killed more than 50 people, and while that heat wave was waning, another was building in Asia, where the Japan Meteorological Agency said that 200 of its 927 stations topped the 35 degree Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) on July 15. Since then, at least 80 people have died and thousands have gone to hospitals with heat-related ailments.
"There are irrefutable scientific evidences that climate change alters both the intensity and frequency of such extreme phenomena as heat waves, and ongoing efforts are dedicated to understand how big the impact of man-made climate change is," said the WMO's Boram Lee.
Across social media, climate scientists are responding with a collective "we warned about this," posting links to 10 years' worth of studies that have consistently been projecting increases in deadly heat waves. If anything, the warnings may have been understated.
"The rise in heat waves is stronger than many climate models project," said World Weather Attribution's Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, who measured a record high temperature outside his office in the Netherlands on July 26, then tweeted that global warming is making the heat there 20 times more likely than in 1900.

Wildfires Out of Control
Hot and dry weather also makes forests more flammable. In Greece, after a month of record and near-record heat, flames ran wild through the community of Mati on July 23, killing at least 80 people. On July 26, a blaze in Northern California jumped the Sacramento River and spawned fire tornadoes, forcing the evacuation of parts of Redding, a city of 92,000. And in Germany, residents of southern Berlin awoke Friday to the sight of smoke on the horizon, an event that will also become more common in that part of the world.
Although climate scientists are reluctant to link any one particular fire to climate change, there is plenty of scientific evidence showing how heat-trapping greenhouse gases contribute to increased fire danger.
"Weather is a product of the climate system. We are drastically altering that system, and all the weather we observe now is the product of that human-altered climate system. One result is an increase in the frequency, size and severity of large fire events," University of California, Merced researcher Leroy Westerling wrote on Twitter.

Residents watch as fires burn into the city of Rafina, near Athens, on July 23. The blazes moved quickly through the drought-parched area, killing more than 80 people. Credit: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

University of Arizona climate researcher and geographer Kevin Anchukaitis publicized several wildfire studies from the last 10 years that all show how and why global warming is making fires bigger, more destructive and longer-lasting. "Is climate change the only factor influencing wildland fire? No, of course not—but climate change is influencing area burned and fuel aridity," he wrote.
Tyndall Centre Director Le Quéré said she faulted some media for failing to connect global warming to the current global heat wave. "This signal is very clear," she said, adding that some of the early stories about the deadly fire in Greece almost seemed to downplay a link to climate change.
On Friday, the WMO released a new statement highlighting the links between global warming and wildfires and reminding readers that "heat is drying out forests and making them more susceptible to burn."

Extreme Rainfall and Flooding
There is also still reluctance to link individual extreme flood events with global warming, despite plenty of scientific evidence that today's global atmosphere—1 degree Celsius warmer than 100 years ago—holds much more moisture that can be delivered by regional storm systems.
Those warnings were not enough to help the more than 200 people who died in Japan in late June amid a series of record-setting torrential rain storms. Regional weather patterns certainly played a role, but ocean currents and an atmosphere juiced up by global warming likely boosted moisture for the storm.

Extreme rainfall unleashed landslides and flooding that knocked homes off their foundations in Kumano, Japan. The storms and floods in early July were blamed for more than 200 deaths. Credit: Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images

Two years ago, Alfred Wegener Institute climate researcher Hu Yang showed how climate change is strengthening ocean currents that carry moisture from the ocean toward Japan. The research showed the currents have been getting stronger and warmer in tandem with rising atmospheric CO2 levels. Eventually, that heat is released to the atmosphere during storms, as wind or rain or both.
Yang said his continuing research is finding similar evidence that a powerful current near Japan may be "a super hotspot under global warming." As the current strengthens, it will release its energy as water vapor, fuel for storms that can cause extra heavy rains in Japan and other parts of Asia, he said.
In the U.S., June flooding in the Midwest fits a detected pattern of increasing extreme rainfalls in that region. And in late July, 10 million people in the East, from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, were under various types of flood warnings with soggy air sloshing from the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean over the overheated Northeastern Atlantic toward the coast.

What Can We Do About It?
In some cases, the scientific warnings about global warming impacts have resonated. At least parts of Europe are better prepared for heat waves now than they were in 2003, when extreme heat killed up to 70,000 people, said Le Quéré.
More cities know what they need to do to protect vulnerable people in an extreme event, she said, but they lack the money to do things  like building more cooling shelters, or cooling core urban areas with green spaces and ponds.
"Maybe this is an opportunity, in a grim way, to prepare for events that will be longer and hotter," she said. "It's not just a case of holding our breath for three weeks and saying 'it's soon winter.' It's a time to push and protect vulnerable people and infrastructure."

To prepare for the new normal, people must act in the next five to 10 years, said environmental scientist Cara Augustenborg, chairperson of Friends of the Earth Europe.
"We have to consider how every new infrastructure, agricultural or development project from now on will be impacted by climate change. We need to look at planned retreat from coastlines and developing further inland, building infrastructure that is more resilient to the effects of climate change such as sea level rise and temperature extremes.
"We've had several years now where airport runways have melted on extremely hot days," she continued. "That's something we need to factor in to future construction as it's a problem that won't go away."
Society also needs to think about food security, she said.
"That's what I really lose sleep over," she said. "Our available arable land is declining now as our global population is booming. It doesn't take much in the way of extreme weather to have a major impact on food supplies."

Links

• Record-Breaking Heat And Fires Are Worsened By Climate Change, Scientists Say
• Fire, Fire Everywhere: The 2018 Global Wildfire Season Is Already Disastrous
• It’s A Savage Summer In The Northern Hemisphere – And Climate Change Is Slashing The Odds Of More Heatwaves
• 'Emphatic': Odds Point To Big Dry Expanding Across Eastern Australia
• Heatwave Made More Than Twice As Likely By Climate Change, Scientists Find
• The Guardian View On The Heatwave: Our Climate Is Endangered
• The Global Heatwave Is About To Hit Your Wallet
• The World Is Hot, On Fire, And Flooding. Climate Change Is Here.

Record-Breaking Heat And Fires Are Worsened By Climate Change, Scientists Say

CBS News - CBS/AP

Heat waves are setting all-time temperature records across the globe -- again. Europe suffered its deadliest fire in more than a century, and one of nearly 90 large fires in the U.S. West burned dozens of homes and forced the evacuation of at least 37,000 people near Redding, California. Flood-inducing downpours have pounded the U.S. East this week.
It's all part of summer -- but it's all being made worse by human-caused climate change, scientists say.
"Weirdness abounds," said Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis.

Raging Wildfire

Japan hit 106 degrees on Monday, its hottest temperature ever. Records fell in parts of Massachusetts, Maine, Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico and Texas. And then there's crazy heat in Europe, where normally chill Norway, Sweden and Finland all saw temperatures they have never seen before on any date, pushing past 90 degrees. So far this month, at least 118 of these all-time heat records have been set or tied across the globe, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The explanations should sound as familiar as the crash of broken records.
"We now have very strong evidence that global warming has already put a thumb on the scales, upping the odds of extremes like severe heat and heavy rainfall," Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh said. "We find that global warming has increased the odds of record-setting hot events over more than 80 percent of the planet, and has increased the odds of record-setting wet events at around half of the planet."

Sunflowers are seen under the sun on July 27, 2018, near Gampelen, Switzerland. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

 Climate change is making the world warmer because of the build-up of heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil and other human activities. And experts say the jet stream -- which dictates weather in the Northern Hemisphere -- is again behaving strangely.
"An unusually sharply kinked jet stream has been stuck in place for weeks now," said Jeff Masters, director of the private Weather Underground. He said that allows the heat to stay in place over three areas where the kinks are: Europe, Japan and the western United States.
The same jet stream pattern caused the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave and fires, the 2011 Texas and Oklahoma drought and the 2016 Canadian wildfires, Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann said, pointing to past studies by him and others. He said in an email that these extremes are "becoming more common because of human-caused climate change and in particular, the amplified warming in the Arctic."
Climate scientists have long said they can't directly link single weather events, like a heat wave, to human-caused climate change without extensive study. In the past decade they have used observations, statistics and computer simulations to calculate if global warming increases the chances of the events.
A study by European scientists Friday found that the ongoing European heat wave is twice as likely because of human-caused global warming, though those conclusions have not yet been confirmed by outside scientists. The World Weather Attribution team said they compared three-day heat measurements and forecasts for the Netherlands, Denmark and Ireland with historical records going back to the early 1900s.

Extreme Heat Across The Globe

"The world is becoming warmer and so heat waves like this are becoming more common," said Friederike Otto, a member of the team and deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford.
Erich Fischer, an expert on weather extremes at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who wasn't part of the analysis said the authors used well-established methods to make their conclusions.
Georgia Tech climate scientist Kim Cobb said the link between climate change and fires isn't as strong as it is with heat waves, but it is becoming clearer.
In the United States on Friday, there were 89 active large fires consuming nearly 900,000 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. The Carr Fire in Northern California has burned hundreds of homes and is threatening thousands of other structures. The blaze began Monday as a small wildfire and erupted into a living hellscape, CBS News' Carter Evans reported from the city of Redding.
"It's like a war zone," one woman said. "It's just like a bomb just hit each house and just exploded."
So far this year, fires have burned 4.15 million acres, which is nearly 14 percent higher than average over the past 10 years. 
In Greece, a devastating fire this month -- with at least 83 fatalities -- is the deadliest fire in Europe since 1900, according to the International Disaster Database run by the Centre for the Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, Belgium.
CBS News correspondent Seth Doane met 74-year-old Maria Nikolaou as she tried to start cleaning up on Wednesday in Greece. The fast-moving wildfire tore through her neighborhood. Her car was gutted, and in minutes her whole neighborhood was consumed.
"Trees were falling everywhere, I was so scared," she said.
The first major science study to connect greenhouse gases to stronger and longer heat waves was in 2004. It was titled "More intense, more frequent and longer lasting heat waves in the 21st century."
Study author Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research said Friday that now it "reads like a prediction of what has been happening and will continue to happen as long as average temperatures continue to rise with ever-increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It's no mystery."

Climate Watch

Links

• It’s A Savage Summer In The Northern Hemisphere – And Climate Change Is Slashing The Odds Of More Heatwaves
• Why hot weather records continue to tumble worldwide
• Yes, the Arctic's freakishly warm winter is due to humans' climate influence
• Three (and a half) reasons why it has been so hot and dry in the UK and IrelandThe 2016 Great Barrier Reef heatwave caused widespread changes to fish populations
• UK ‘woefully unprepared’ for deadly heatwaves, warn MPs
• London's long hot summer – in pictures
• Whinge on, Brits – even Australians can't take this heat
• Why is Europe going through a heatwave?
• Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist
• Global warming to blame for hundreds of heatwave deaths, scientists say
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Brexit voters almost twice as likely to disbelieve in manmade climate change
• Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
• Europe's record hot year made at least 35 times more likely by climate change, say scientists

Fire, Fire Everywhere: The 2018 Global Wildfire Season Is Already Disastrous

Huffington Post - John Vidal

A warming planet has exacerbated a dire global fire threat brought on by growing cities, poor urban planning and more combustible landscapes.

Yannis Behrakis / Reuters 

Drought turned the surrounding woodland into fuel, strong winds fanned the flames and in just a few hours this week fired consumed the Greek coastal resort of Mati, outside Athens. Homes and hotels were scorched or destroyed, more than 80 people died and many hundreds ran to the sea, seeking refuge from the flames.
Mati is the deadliest wildfire of 2018 so far, but the northern hemisphere fire season now extends from June until October, and more death and destruction is inevitable as one of the strongest, longest-lasting global heatwaves in decades continues to envelop countries from Siberia to the Mediterranean, from North America to East Asia. Temperature records keep getting surpassed, and there’s little rain in the forecast for many regions.
People have had to be evacuated from Yosemite National Park, Sweden has lost an estimated 30,000 hectares of forest and large areas of bone-dry Latvia, Italy, Finland and Norway have all been blanketed in smoke.
The 2018 wildfire season has been dramatic, prompting headlines about the world being on fire, but it is only unusual in that so many places are experiencing major fires at the same time, scientists say. Large blazes wracked Indonesia in 2015, Canada and Spain in 2016, and Chile and Portugal in 2017. In Russia, villages, farmland and more than 1,100 square miles of forest were destroyed in 2010, and again in 2015.

Fires used to be seen as local, but we should see them as part of a global-scale phenomenon.

In the United States, nearly 4 million acres across Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Oregon have burned so far this year, about 10 percent more than the annual average at this time of year, but still nowhere near the 10 million acres that burned in 2015, according to the U.S. National Interagency Fire Center.
A 2016 report by the European Environment Agency suggests Mediterranean countries are seeing more heat extremes and reduced rainfall, resulting in more forest fires. The number of fires this year across Europe is up 40 percent on average, according to the European Forest Fire Information System.
The disastrous fires are due both to human behavior and planetary change, said David Bowman, a professor of environmental change biology at the University of Tasmania in Australia.
“Growing cities, poor planning, recurring heatwaves, more people living closer to forests and more combustible landscapes have together created a more fire-prone world,” said Bowman.
On top of these factors is the devastating impact of climate change, which through higher temperatures is now accelerating ecological instability. “It is causing fire seasons to start earlier and finish later,” said Bowman. “We are seeing more severe, more intense and longer lasting wildfires causing more loss of life and property. Fires used to be seen as local, but we should see them as part of a global-scale phenomenon.”
Studies in the U.S., Australia and Europe show wildfires increasing in number and scale, and becoming increasingly an urban problem.
“We are confronting more large fires, a tripling of homes burned and more frequent large evacuations in North America,” said Tania Schoennagel, a fire scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “This trend will continue in response to further warming.”

Firefighters tackle a forest fire near Potsdam, Germany, on July 26, 2018. JULIAN STAHLE via Getty Images

“Wildland fire can be a friend and a foe,” explains the U.S. Forest Service.
“In the right place at the right time, wildland fire can create many environmental benefits, such as reducing grass, brush, and trees that can fuel large and severe wildfires and improve wildlife habitat,” said a Forest Service spokesman. But In the wrong place at the wrong time, fires can threaten lives, homes and resources.
“Earth has evolved through fire and plants and humans have evolved to adapt to fiery landscapes,” said Andrew Scott, author of a new book, Burning Planet, and professor of geology at Royal Holloway, University of London. “Fire has become the enemy in cities, but we have to learn to live with it.”
The vast majority of fires are caused not by lightning or natural events, but by human error or vandalism, according to the U.S. National Park Service. As much as 90 percent are the result of things like campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, negligently discarded cigarettes or arson.

Growing cities, poor planning, recurring heatwaves, more people living closer to forests, and more combustible landscapes have together created a more fire-prone world.

“Changing climatic and weather conditions are exacerbating these problems,” said Fantina Tedim, a researcher at the University of Porto, Portugal. “Wildland is coming closer to settlements, rural areas are likely to be depopulated with the result that there is less management of forests and more build-up of flammable material.”

Because humans can start fires so easily, there is no simple way to prevent them, short of drastic and likely unfeasible solutions like removing people permanently from susceptible areas or redesigning landscapes to remove trees completely.
“Managing fire is about managing landscape,” said Bowman. “We are creating landscapes that are increasingly flammable. People are living in more and more dangerous environments because they believe technology will keep them safe.”
“We are just not prepared,” he continued. “Will there be more fires? With climate change, yes, lots more. We must get used to them, and learn to adapt. It’s like the earth has thrown down the gauntlet and we are paralyzed.”

Links

• It’s A Savage Summer In The Northern Hemisphere – And Climate Change Is Slashing The Odds Of More Heatwaves
• Why hot weather records continue to tumble worldwide
• Yes, the Arctic's freakishly warm winter is due to humans' climate influence
• Three (and a half) reasons why it has been so hot and dry in the UK and IrelandThe 2016 Great Barrier Reef heatwave caused widespread changes to fish populations
• UK ‘woefully unprepared’ for deadly heatwaves, warn MPs
• London's long hot summer – in pictures
• Whinge on, Brits – even Australians can't take this heat
• Why is Europe going through a heatwave?
• Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist
• Global warming to blame for hundreds of heatwave deaths, scientists say
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Brexit voters almost twice as likely to disbelieve in manmade climate change
• Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
• Europe's record hot year made at least 35 times more likely by climate change, say scientists

It’s A Savage Summer In The Northern Hemisphere – And Climate Change Is Slashing The Odds Of More Heatwaves

The Conversation - Andrew King | Ben Henley

Firefighters and volunteers battle a blaze near Loutraki in southern Greece. Vassilis Psomas/EPA

In Australia we know about sweltering summer heat. We all remember the images of burned koala paws, collapsing tennis players and, far more seriously, the tragic events of Black Saturday.
Aussies may scoff at Britain’s idea of a heatwave, but this time it’s the real deal and it’s no laughing matter.
Extreme heat has hit locations throughout the Northern Hemisphere, in places as far apart as Montreal, Glasgow, Tokyo and Lapland. In the past few weeks heat records have tumbled in a wide range of places, most notably:

• a new record high temperature for Africa of 51.3℃ in Algeria
• a record high temperature in Japan of 41.1℃ near Tokyo
• a world record hottest overnight minimum of 42.6℃ in Oman.

Heat has not been the only problem. Much of northern Europe is experiencing a very persistent drought, with little to no measurable rainfall in months. This has caused the normally lush green fields of England and other European countries to turn brown and even reveal previously hidden archaeological monuments.
There have also been major wildfires in northern England, Sweden and, most recently and devastatingly, Greece. The Greek wildfires came off the back of a very dry winter and spring.

What’s behind the widespread extreme heat?
The jet stream, a high-altitude band of air that pushes weather systems around at lower altitudes, has been weaker than normal. It has also been positioned unusually far to the north, particularly over Europe. This has kept the low-pressure systems that often drive wind and rain over northern Europe at bay.
The jet stream has remained locked in roughly the same position over the Atlantic Ocean and northern Europe for the past couple of months. This has meant that the same weather types have remained over the same locations most of the time.
Weather is typically more transient than it has been recently. Even when we do have blocking high-pressure systems associated with high temperatures in northern Europe, they don’t normally linger as long as this.

Is it driven by climate change?
Although climatologists have made great strides in recent years in the field of event attribution – identifying the human climate fingerprint on particular extreme weather events – it is hard to quantify the role of climate change in an event that is still unfolding.
Until the final numbers are in we won’t be able to tell just how much climate change has altered the likelihood or intensity of these particular heat extremes.
Having said that, we can use past analyses of extreme heat events, together with future climate change projections, to infer whether climate change is playing a role in these events.
We also know that increasing numbers of hot temperature records are being set, and that the increased probability of hot temperature records can indeed be attributed to the human influence on the climate.
In Europe especially, there is already a large body of literature that has looked at the role of human-caused climate change in heat extremes. In fact, the very first event attribution study, led by Peter Stott from the UK Met Office, found that human-caused climate change had at least doubled the likelihood of the infamous European heatwave of 2003.

People in Brussels trying to escape the heat in 2003. EPA Photo/Belga/Jacques Collet

For all manner of heat extremes in Europe and elsewhere, including in Japan, a clear and discernible link with climate change has been made.
Research has also shown that heat extremes similar to those witnessed over the past month or two are expected to become more common as global temperatures continue to climb. The world has so far had around 1℃ of global warming above pre-industrial levels, but at the global warming limits proposed in the Paris climate agreement, hot summers like that of 2003 in central Europe would be a common occurrence.
At 2℃ of global warming, the higher of the two Paris targets, 2003-like hot summers would very likely happen in most years.
Similarly, we know that heat exposure and heat-induced deaths in Europe will increase with global warming, even if we can limit this warming to the levels agreed in Paris.

But summers have always been hot, haven’t they?
For most parts of the world summers have got warmer, and the hottest summer on record is relatively recent – such as 2003 in parts of central Europe and 2010 in much of eastern Europe. One exception is central England, where the hottest summer remains 1976, although it may be challenged this year.
While extreme hot summers and heatwaves did happen in the past, they were less common. One big difference as far as England is concerned is that its extreme 1976 heatwave was a global outlier, whereas this year’s isn’t.
In 1976 northwestern Europe had higher temperature anomalies than almost anywhere else on the globe. In June 2018 the same region was unusually warm, but so was most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.
So while the persistent weather patterns are driving much of the extreme heat we’re seeing across the Northern Hemisphere, we know that human-caused climate change is nudging the temperatures up and increasing the odds of new heat extremes.

Links

• Why hot weather records continue to tumble worldwide
• Yes, the Arctic's freakishly warm winter is due to humans' climate influence
• Three (and a half) reasons why it has been so hot and dry in the UK and IrelandThe 2016 Great Barrier Reef heatwave caused widespread changes to fish populations
• UK ‘woefully unprepared’ for deadly heatwaves, warn MPs
• London's long hot summer – in pictures
• Whinge on, Brits – even Australians can't take this heat
• Why is Europe going through a heatwave?
• Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist
• Global warming to blame for hundreds of heatwave deaths, scientists say
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Brexit voters almost twice as likely to disbelieve in manmade climate change
• Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
• Europe's record hot year made at least 35 times more likely by climate change, say scientists

'Emphatic': Odds Point To Big Dry Expanding Across Eastern Australia

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Fire authorities, farmers and even water storage managers may be in for even more trying times as odds increase for the drier and hotter conditions across eastern Australia to continue deep into spring.
Places such as Sydney are already on track for record-breaking July temperatures amid the lowest rainfall in decades.
The Bureau of Meteorology's latest three-month outlook, updated on Thursday, points to more of the same for months to come.

There's no sign of a let-up for most of eastern Australia's drier and hotter than average weather. Photo: Johnathan Carroll

While the August-October forecast suggests odds favour a drier and hotter than normal stint for mainland south-eastern Australian, the chances are particularly strong for next month alone, Jonathan Pollock, a bureau climatologist, said.
"It's unusual to have such widespread emphatic odds," Mr Pollock said.

Chance of exceeding the median Rainfall for August

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

"Everywhere south of Armidale [in north NSW] has a greater than 80 per cent chance of below-average rainfall," he said.
So far in July, rainfall totals in NSW have been less than half the norm for much of the state. For the first six months of the year, they were also half the average, marking the driest start to a year since 1986, the bureau has said.
For Sydney alone, this month is on track to being the driest July since 1995 on current forecasts, with just 9.8 millimetres so far collected at Observatory Hill. A typical July would have almost 10 times that, at 96.6 millimetres.

Record warmth
The standout for Sydney, though, may be its daytime temperatures. On Thursday, the mercury climbed above 20 degrees for the eighth day this month, with five more forecast by July 31.

Much of eastern Australia has experienced a very dry first half of the year, and the likelihood of an El Nino developing is around 50-50. Vision: Bureau of Meteorology.

The record number of such days is 12, in 2013. Even if the record is not broken, there's a fair chance the bar will be lifted for maximum temperatures, also set 2013 at 19.5 degrees. A typical July averages 16.4 degrees.
As Fairfax Media reported on Monday, authorities have already brought forward the start of the official fire season for parts of north-eastern NSW.  Some other regions, where the season would typically start in October, are likely to be brought forward to September.

Chance of exceeding the median Max Temp for August

Source: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Farmers wilt
Mr Pollock said parts of the state had soil moisture levels down to 1 per cent of normal conditions, hammering farmers.

Sheep hunt for grass on a farm near Manilla, not far from Tamworth, in northern NSW. Photo: Peter Hardin

Among other things, it also means rainfall when it comes would likely be first soaked up in the soils rather than ending up in dams and rivers.
"That's bad news for water storage," Mr Pollock said.
The reason for the lifting of odds for poor rainfall and warmer-than-usual conditions is partly a cooling of waters off Western Australia of late. This shift tends to reduce moisture over the continent.
There have also been weaker and fewer rain-bearing cold fronts extending into south-eastern Australia amid generally relatively weak westerly winds, Mr Pollock said.

El Nino lurks
While the bureau's outlook only covers the coming three months, there are few signs the pattern will be breaking up soon. In fact, it could extend beyond spring, if an El Nino forms in the Pacific later this year.
The current odds for an El Nino - which typically means less rainfall than usual and higher temperatures across much of Australia - are about 50-50, Mr Pollock said.
Five of the bureau's eight main international models it analyses point to El Nino thresholds being crossed by the spring, and a sixth has it reached by December.

Links

• Overview - Summary for August to October - Climate Outlooks
• Temperature - Summary for August to October
• Rainfall - The chance of above median for August to October
• Rainfall - Totals that have a 75% chance of occurring for August to October
• Dry and warm weather set to continue

Federal Labor, Experts Call For Full Release Of Energy Plan Modelling

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The Turnbull government and regulators must release the modelling underpinning the National Energy Guarantee to reassure the public that projected savings are real, Federal Labor and leading analysts said.
The call comes as discrepancies appear both with the policy's own figures - handed to state and territory governments this week by the Energy Security Board - and with those of one of the board's key members.

What are the underlying assumptions that have gone into the National Energy Guarantee's forecasts?

Labor-led state and territory governments are planning to caucus a range of demands on the energy plan for the federal government in coming days.
Seeking some form of external peer-review of the board's modelling for its full final design paper has been raised with at least one state government, Fairfax Media understands.
One complaint is governments are under excessive pressure to reach a decision by the next COAG energy ministers meeting set for August 10 in Sydney without all the information before them.
A key sales pitch by the board is the estimate, revealed this week, that the scheme will cut households' power bills by an average $150 a year - as part of $550 in overall savings - during the first decade of its operation, starting from 2020.
"Where is the modelling that proves this?" Mark Butler, federal Labor's climate spokesman said. "All modelling of the NEG should be made available so stakeholders and the public can properly assess its merits."
Josh Frydenberg, federal Environment and Energy Minister, declined to comment on any modelling release, but said: “The National Energy Guarantee will deliver a more affordable and reliable energy system. Modelling undertaken by the independent experts from the Energy Security Board shows households will be $550 a year better off under the Guarantee compared to today.”
A board spokeswoman said the body "is yet to publish the final detailed design [of the plan]," but had "real confidence that the design can deliver on the objectives of affordable, reliable and clean power for Australian households and businesses".
Liberal-led NSW is not among those pressing for additional data.
"The modelling is an internal matter of the Energy Security Board," a spokesman for Don Harwin, NSW's Energy Minister, said.
Bruce Mountain, director of the Victoria Energy Policy Centre - set up recently by that state's Labor government - said the guarantee's projected cost savings were difficult to understand.
Since the emissions target of the plan - cutting 2005-level carbon pollution in the electricity sector by 2030 - will be achieved almost as soon as the scheme begins, the driver of falling prices was unclear, he said.
"How can a policy that is designed to do something that will happen anyway cause prices to be any lower than they would be anyway?" Mr Mountain said, adding that since state governments would sign off on the plan, they should be asked to demonstrate the savings were real.
Dylan McConnell, an energy expert at Melbourne University, noted assumptions contained in the version of the plan leaked to the public this week were at odds with those formally released a week earlier by the Australian Energy Market Operator in its Integrated System Plan.
For instance, the market operator included in its base case the state-run renewable energy plans for Victoria and Queensland. They would help lift clean energy's share of the electricity sector to 46 per cent by 2030 - not far shy of federal Labor's pledge of 50 per cent.
That additional generation, however, is absent in the board's modelling even though the market operator is one of its members and the Victorian target is legislated.
Similarly at odds is the board's modelling that assumes the multibillion-dollar Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro scheme - a key Turnbull government proposal - will go ahead while the market operator does not have project in its base scenario, Mr McConnell said.
The board's modelling "is certainly not consistent" with the market operator's, he said.

Links

• Government's Energy Plan Would Guarantee A 'Nightmare' Of Complexity
• Electricity Plan Would All But Hit Emissions Goal Before It Starts
• Tender Will Allow Coalition To Dig Its Way Out Of Coal Hole
• Renewables Will Replace Ageing Coal Plants At Lowest Cost, AEMO Says
• Prolong The Life Of Coal-Fired Power Stations In The National Electricity Market, Says Australian Energy Market Operator
• Greenpeace And Getup Launch Campaign To Kill National Energy Guarantee
• National Energy Guarantee 'Clumsy, Inefficient', Says VEPC's Mountain
• Phony Peace? Challenges To Energy Plan Sent Back To Modelling Board
• 'Not A Big Drama' For Electricity Industry To Slash Emissions, Says Scheme Architect
• Victoria Demands New Detailed Analysis On NEG After COAG Meeting
• NEG: A Bipartisan Agreement To Disagree?

Heatwave Made More Than Twice As Likely By Climate Change, Scientists Find

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Fingerprints of global warming clear, they say, after comparing northern Europe’s scorching summer with records and computer models

The dried-out riverbank of Elbe in Magdeburg, eastern Germany … climate change link to heatwave proven, scientists say. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

The heatwave searing northern Europe was made more than twice as likely by climate change, according to a rapid assessment by scientists.
The result is preliminary but they say the signal of climate change is “unambiguous”. Scientists have long predicted that global warming is ramping up the number and intensity of heatwaves, with events even worse than current one set to strike every other year by the 2040s.
“The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer, and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,” said Friederike Otto, at the University of Oxford and part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium that did the work.
“What was once regarded as unusually warm weather will become commonplace, and in some cases, it already has,” she said. “So this is something that society can and should prepare for. But equally there is no doubt that we can and should constrain the increasing likelihood of all kinds of extreme weather events by restricting greenhouse gas emissions as sharply as possible.”
The new analysis is a climate-change attribution study. By comparing extreme weather with historical measurements and with computer models of a climate unaltered by carbon emissions, researchers can find how much global warming is increasing the risk of dangerous weather.

The researchers analysed records of the hottest three-day period at seven weather stations in northern Europe, from Ireland to the Netherlands to Scandinavia, where data was easily accessible.


Why is it so hot? – video explainer 

“We found that for the weather station in the far north, in the Arctic Circle, the current heatwave is just extraordinary – unprecedented in the historical record,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and also part of WWA.
Across northern Europe, the group found global warming more than doubled the risk of scorching temperatures. “We can can see the fingerprints of climate change on local extremes,” he said. “It is amazing now that it is something you can really see at a local level.”
“Most heatwave studies have been done on large scale averages, so European-wide temperatures,” said Otto. “In this study, we have looked at individual locations, where people live, to represent the heatwave people are actually experiencing.” The analysis is a preliminary study as a full study requires many climate models to be run on high-powered computers, which takes months.
Previous attribution analyses have shown very strong connections between climate change and extreme weather events. The scorching summer in New South Wales, Australia, in 2016-17 was made at least 50 times more likely by global warming, meaning it can be “linked directly to climate change”, said the scientists.
The “Lucifer” heatwave across Europe’s Mediterranean nations in 2017 summer was made at least 10 times more likely by climate change, while the unprecedented deluge delivered in the US by Hurricane Harvey also in 2017 was made three times more likely by climate change, new research has found. However, other events, such as storms Eleanor and Friederike, which hit western Europe in January, were not made more likely by climate change, according to the scientists.
In Europe, the heatwave has been caused by the stalling of the jet stream wind, which usually funnels cool Atlantic weather over the continent. This has left hot, dry air in place for two months – far longer than than usual. The stalling of the northern hemisphere jet stream is being increasingly firmly linked to global warming, in particular to the rapid heating of the Arctic and resulting loss of sea ice.
The role of climate change in driving extreme weather events may actually be underestimated by these attribution studies, according to Prof Michael E Mann at Penn State University in the US. The work is good, he said, but computer models cannot yet reliably account for the complex jet stream changes caused by global warming, making the attribution studies “inherently conservative”.
Serious climate change is “unfolding before our eyes”, said Prof Rowan Sutton, director of climate research at the University of Reading. “No one should be in the slightest surprised that we are seeing very serious heatwaves and associated impacts in many parts of the world.”
The wide geographical spread of the heatwave, right across four continents, points to global warming as the culprit, said Prof Peter Stott, a science fellow at the UK’s Met Office: “That pattern is something we wouldn’t be seeing without climate change.”
The heatwave across northern Europe has seen wildfires in the Arctic Circle and prolonged heat across the UK and the European continent. In the south, fierce blazes have devastated parts of Greece, with scores of people killed.
But extreme weather has struck across the globe. Severe floods killed at least 220 people in Japan in early July, with the nation then hit by an “unprecedented” heatwave that peaked at 41.1C and left 35,000 people in hospital. In the US, extreme heat in the west is feeding wildfires, with Yosemite national park being evacuated, while flooding is affecting the east.
Temperature records have also fallen in Taiwan, with a temperature of 40.3C in Tianxiang, and in Ouargla in Algeria’s Sahara desert, which reported a maximum temperature of 51.3C, the highest temperature ever reliably recorded in Africa. The first six months of the 2018 are the hottest recorded for any year without an El Niño event, a natural climate cycle that raises temperatures.

Links

• UK ‘woefully unprepared’ for deadly heatwaves, warn MPs
• London's long hot summer – in pictures
• Whinge on, Brits – even Australians can't take this heat
• Why is Europe going through a heatwave?
• Extreme global weather is 'the face of climate change' says leading scientist
• Global warming to blame for hundreds of heatwave deaths, scientists say
• Shattered records show climate change is an emergency today, scientists warn
• Brexit voters almost twice as likely to disbelieve in manmade climate change
• Paris floods made almost twice as likely by climate change, say scientists
• Europe's record hot year made at least 35 times more likely by climate change, say scientists