2018’s Hemispheric Heat Wave Wasn't Possible Without Climate Change, Scientists Say

As temperatures spiked across a large part of the Northern Hemisphere last summer, I got an alarming call from my mother, who was living in Linz, Austria. She was dizzy and disoriented, and she hadn't been sleeping.

Eduardo Velev cools off in the spray of a fire hydrant in
Philadelphia during a July 2018 heat wave. Scientists say
 last summer's extreme heat across the Northern Hemisphere
 wouldn’t have happened without human-induced climate change.

The region had been suffering through several weeks of above average day and nighttime temperatures, and when I arrived, her apartment building felt like a concrete oven. Her symptoms sounded like heat exhaustion.

We helped her pack a bag, checked on an elderly neighbor with similar symptoms, and then left the sweltering city for a mountain lake like we were first-world climate refugees.

A study presented this week at a scientific conference in Vienna now shows that last summer's extreme heat was an "unprecedented" hemispheric event that would not have happened without heat-trapping greenhouse gas pollution, the researchers said, and that it lasted longer and was more widespread across the Northern Hemisphere than previously realized.

Read the story from Inside Climate News by Bob Berwyn - “2018’s Hemispheric Heat Wave Wasn't Possible Without Climate Change, Scientists Say.”