Climate Change Fingerprints Confirmed in Lucifer’s Wicked Heat: Europe’s Record Hot Summer Made Much Worse by Human Activity.

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, senior
researcher at the Royal Netherlands
 Meteorological Institute (KNMI).

Scientists with World Weather Attribution (WWA), using a combination of observed temperature data and climate models, have concluded that human-caused climate change made the record-breaking 2017 summer temperatures in the Euro-Mediterranean region at least 10 times more likely. WWA is an international coalition of scientists focused on assessing possible climate change in uences on extreme weather events.

“We found clear evidence of human influence on this summer’s record warmth — both in the overall summer temperatures and in the heat wave dubbed Lucifer,” said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). "In many towns and cities across Southern Europe, there is now a one in 10 chance of seeing a heat wave as hot as we saw during this past summer every summer,” van Oldenborgh added. “In the early 1900s, a summer like the one we just experienced would have been extremely rare.”

Read the World Weather Attribution story “Climate Change Fingerprints Confirmed in Lucifer’s Wicked Heat: Europe’s Record Hot Summer Made Much Worse by Human Activity.”