Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer

In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Ouargla, Algeria, hit 124 degrees on July 5, a likely record for the continent of Africa. And the 109-degree reading in Quriyat, Oman, on June 28 amazed meteorologists because that wasn’t the day’s high temperature. That was the low . It was the hottest low temperature ever recorded on Earth.

Read the story from The Washington Post - “Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer.”

'Digging deeper' to understand climate change

David Karoly.

The thermometer pushed 50 degrees C at times as Australia sweltered thought its hottest year on record in 2013. So was this the effect of human-induced climate change – or just a very hot year?

While politicians confidently gave their opinions, climate scientist David Karoly decided to dig deeper.

 

He ran a study which concluded it was “virtually impossible” to have reached those temperatures without humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“This couldn’t happen without climate change … it’s the first time that any study has been able to make such strong conclusions,” he says. That study landed on the front page of the New York Times, which described it as “perhaps the most definitive statement climate scientists have made tying a specific weather event to global warming”.

Read more about this here: “Tracking climate change - in real time”