{"id":76076,"date":"2022-10-06T11:24:24","date_gmt":"2022-10-06T15:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.carilec.org\/?p=76076"},"modified":"2022-10-06T11:24:24","modified_gmt":"2022-10-06T15:24:24","slug":"climate-change-made-summer-hotter-and-drier-worldwide-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/climate-change-made-summer-hotter-and-drier-worldwide-study-finds\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate Change Made Summer Hotter and Drier Worldwide, Study Finds"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A field destroyed by a brush fire in the drought-ravaged village of Xinyao in Jiangxi Province, China, in August. Credit…Thomas Peter\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Raymond By\u00a0<\/span>Raymond Zhong<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Human-caused global warming has made severe droughts like the ones this summer in Europe, North America and China at least 20 times as likely to occur as they would have been more than a century ago, scientists said Wednesday. It\u2019s the latest evidence of how climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels is imperiling food, water and electricity supplies around the world.<\/p>\n

The main driver of this year\u2019s droughts was searing heat throughout much of the Northern Hemisphere, the researchers reported in a new study. Such high average temperatures, over such a large area, would have been \u201cvirtually impossible\u201d without the influence of greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said.<\/p>\n

Across the Northern Hemisphere north of the tropics, soil conditions as parched as they were this summer now have a roughly 1-in-20 chance of occurring each year, the scientists found. Global warming increased this likelihood, they said, but cautioned that because of the challenges involved in estimating soil moisture at a global scale, the exact size of the increase had a wide possible range.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many of these countries and regions, we are clearly, according to the science, already seeing the fingerprints of climate change,\u201d said Maarten van Aalst, the director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center and one of 21 researchers who prepared the new study as part of the World Weather Attribution initiative, a research collaboration that specializes in\u00a0rapid analysis of extreme weather events<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe impacts are now very clear to people, and they\u2019re hitting hard,\u201d Dr. van Aalst said.<\/p>\n

Extreme summer dryness that\u00a0ravages crops<\/a>,\u00a0cripples river commerce<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0strains hydropower generation<\/a>\u00a0across so much of the planet would be hugely problematic on its own. This year, though, global food and energy prices had already been rising for other reasons, including Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

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The Castaic Lake reservoir in Los Angeles County was at 35 percent capacity in October, well below its average of 43\u00a0 percent. Credit…Mario Tama\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Record heat<\/a>\u00a0began smothering Europe in May, and roasting temperatures dried out rivers and fueled wildfires for prolonged stretches over the next few months. The heat might have contributed to\u00a011,000 excess deaths<\/a>\u00a0in France and\u00a08,000 in Germany<\/a>, according to estimates. Across the European Union, summer wildfires\u00a0burned a total area<\/a>\u00a0more than twice as large as the average over the previous 15 years.<\/p>\n

China had its most brutal summer since modern records began in 1961, according to\u00a0the country\u2019s meteorological authority<\/a>, with hot and dry weather reducing hydropower output in the manufacturing-heavy south. To\u00a0keep production lines running<\/a>\u00a0at car and electronics factories, China dug up and burned more coal, increasing its contribution to global warming.<\/p>\n

And in the United States,\u00a0nearly half<\/a>\u00a0of the area of the lower 48 states experienced moderate to extreme drought this summer, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Parts of the Southwest and California remain stuck in a\u00a020-year-plus megadrought<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To gauge the influence of global warming on droughts and other extreme weather events, scientists use computer simulations to examine both the real-world climate and an alternate climate in which humans hadn\u2019t burned fossil fuels and emitted greenhouse gases for more than a century. They see how often weather events as severe as the one in question occur in both worlds. The differences suggest how much global warming was to blame.<\/p>\n

Scientists with World Weather Attribution found\u00a0last month<\/a>\u00a0that climate change had quite likely worsened this summer\u2019s devastating floods in Pakistan, which have killed 1,600 people, damaged two million homes and submerged large stretches of farmland. Earlier,\u00a0they found<\/a>\u00a0that global warming had made Britain\u2019s record-shattering July heat wave both hotter and more likely to occur.<\/p>\n

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The 14th-century Puente de la Mesta in central-western Spain in August. The bridge has been mostly submerged since the creation of a reservoir in the 1950s.Credit…Thomas Coex\/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Droughts are harder to study than hot spells. Scorching temperatures and weak rainfall aren\u2019t the only factors that influence them. Local landscape features also play a role. Plus, while sensor technologies are constantly improving, estimating the amount of moisture in the soil across large areas is hard to do reliably compared with measuring temperature or precipitation.<\/p>\n

The authors of the new report looked at soil moisture levels from June through August across two geographic areas: the entire Northern Hemisphere north of the tropics, and a swath of continental Europe from France to Ukraine. They also looked at this summer\u2019s temperatures and precipitation in both areas.<\/p>\n

For the Northern Hemisphere region, the scientists found that, because the planet has already warmed by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 Celsius) since the late 1800s, this summer\u2019s low moisture levels in the first few feet below the soil\u2019s surface, where many plants\u2019 roots draw water, had been at least 20 times as likely to occur compared with a hypothetical world with no burning of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

This has already made this summer\u2019s drought a \u201crelatively frequent\u201d occurrence in the present climate, said Sonia I. Seneviratne, a scientist at the Swiss university ETH Zurich and another author of the study. But if the globe warms to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius) above preindustrial temperatures, as is likely under governments\u2019 current policies, such dryness will become an additional 15 times as likely, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cBasically, it would happen every year, every other year, more or less,\u201d Dr. Seneviratne said.<\/p>\n

For Western and Central Europe, global warming increased the chances of this summer\u2019s dryness by a factor of three to four, the researchers found. This doesn\u2019t mean Europe is less affected by climate change than other parts of the Northern Hemisphere, they said. Because it is a smaller area than the Northern Hemisphere above the tropics, natural variations in the weather cancel each other out less than they do for the larger region, said Friederike Otto, a scientist at Imperial College London and another study author.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is absolutely no doubt that climate change did play a big role here,\u201d Dr. Otto said. But, she continued, \u201cthe exact quantification of that role is more uncertain for soil moisture than, for example, when we look at heavy precipitation.\u201d<\/p>\n

SOURCE: \"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

Raymond Zhong is a climate reporter. He joined The Times in 2017 and was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Raymond Zhong Oct. 5, 2022 Human-caused global warming has made severe droughts like the ones this summer in Europe, North […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":165,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"featured_image":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/wp-includes\/images\/media\/default.svg","month_date":"Oct","day_date":"6","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carilec.org\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}