Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published recently.
Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023.The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.
Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.
“It just shows that it’s not that many actors… who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study’s contributors.
The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository.The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren’t suitable for their analysis.
Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found.Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialisation began accelerating in the 1800s.The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves “would have been virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.
“Many of these heat waves had very strong consequences,” said Seneviratne.She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths
sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences.
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