Top News Story –

Climate change: Heatwave made ‘at least’ five times more likely by warming

Last week’s record breaking heatwave across much of Europe was made “at least five times” more likely to happen by climate change, say scientists.

Their rapid attribution study says that rising temperatures “super-charged” the event, making it more likely to happen than through natural variability alone.

Heatwaves in June are now about 4C hotter than they used to be, the researchers said.

Globally, the average temperature for June was the highest on record.

The immediate cause of the heatwave was the weather, with hot air drawn in from northern Africa, caused by high pressure over central Europe and a storm stalling over the Atlantic.

By lucky coincidence, the authors of this new study happened to be in Toulouse, France, at a conference on climate change and extreme events.

The researchers, members of the World Weather Attribution Group decided to use the opportunity to analyse the link between human-induced climate change and the heatwave.

They defined the heatwave as the highest three-day averaged daily mean temperature in June, arguing that this is a better indicator of health impacts than maximums or minimums.

The researchers compared the observations of temperatures recorded during the month of June with climate models that can show how the world would be without the human influence on the climate.

They found that, over France, the probability of having a heatwave had increased by at least a factor of five. However, the researchers say that this influence could be much higher still, by a factor of 100 or more.

“We are very confident that this lower boundary of factor five is valid – but we are not confident we can say much more than that,” said Dr Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.

“The reason we are fairly careful is because we found fairly large discrepancies between the modelled properties of heatwaves and the observed properties of heatwaves. They all show stronger heatwaves but the trend in the observations is much larger than in the trends in the model.”

According to those involved with this study, this trend in heatwaves is likely to get worse.

“We experienced a heatwave whose intensity could become the norm in the middle of the century,” said Dr Robert Vautard, Senior Scientist, CNRS, France.

“The new record of 45.9C set in France last Friday is one more step to confirmation that, without urgent climate mitigation actions, temperatures in France could potentially rise to about 50°C or more in France by the end of the century.”

The researchers believe that if global warming continues to the 2C level envisioned in the Paris climate agreement, heatwaves like the one experienced last week will become the norm in June.

(BBC)

Twitter trends [from Trendinalia] – today from USA

Other News Stories –

Armed conflicts and attacks

• Islamist militants attack a Niger Armed Forces base in the village of Inates, near the border with Mali, with two car bombs and gunmen, killing 18 soldiers. They also kidnapped four Nigerien soldiers and stole dozens of vehicles. (BBC)
• Second Libyan Civil War
  • A Libyan National Army airstrike on a suburb of Tripoli hits a detention centre for illegal migrants, killing at least 53 people and injuring 80 people. (Reuters), (CNN)

Disasters and accidents

• A fire on the Russian Navy‘s Losharik submarine kills 14 crew members while the vessel conducts tests in Russian territorial waters. (Sky News) (RFERL)
• At least 18 people have died and more than a dozen are still missing in devastating floods that swept southeastern Siberia, Russia. (The Japan Times)

International relations

• Iran–Saudi Arabia relations, Japan–Saudi Arabia relations
  • Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs Adel al-Jubeir says his country will work with Japan and other nations to come up with a plan to ensure that ships can safely transit the Persian Gulfregion. Jubeir also calls for “action” on Iran. (NHK)
• China–United Kingdom relations, Hong Kong–United Kingdom relations, 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests, Aftermath of the Handover of Hong Kong
  • China warns the United Kingdom that “no country has the right to intervene on the issue of mass protests in Hong Kong“, as it considers the problems of this self-governed city an “internal problem”. For China, the agreement by which the United Kingdom returned Hong Kong is nothing more than “a historical document of no practical importance” and “that European country no longer has any responsibility over Hong Kong”. The British chancellery, for its part, dismissed the Chinese opinion, and has said that “it is the right and obligation of the United Kingdom to work to enforce the agreement”, which, in theory, guarantees a high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong for 50 years until 2047 without Chinese interference. (Sky News)

Politics and elections

• 2020 United States Presidential election
  • There has been a shake-up within the campaign organization of former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, which includes the departure of the manager of Hickenlooper’s presidential campaign, Bradley Komar. Komar and other departing staffers reportedly believe that Hickenlooper should quit the race as he has no realistic prospect of victory. (Reuters).
• Education in Argentina, Argentina–Cuba relations
  • Argentine Education Minister Alejandro Finocchiaro, who strongly condemned a school in Chaco Province for displaying a Cuban flag and displaying pictures of Che Guevara, says the school “has no supervision” and that they are “indoctrinating children with communism and totalitarian and populist governments”. He also added in an interview on state TV that the school will be reviewed. (La Nación) (Clarín)
• The Fidesz supermajority of Hungary’s National Assembly passes a bill, which takes the entire research network away from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and hands them to a new government-backed organisation. (Index)
• Tax returns of Donald Trump
  • The U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means sues U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and Commissioner of Internal Revenue Charles Rettig to obtain six years of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s tax returns. (NPR)
• 2019 European Parliament election
  • The Ninth European Parliament starts its term. (BBC)
  • Fugitive Catalan independence leaders Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín, together with imprisoned Oriol Junqueras, are not allowed to take office as MEPs by the Supreme Court of Spain and Court of Justice of the European Union, while a pro-independence demonstration takes place in Strasbourg. (Reuters)
  • The European Council nominates German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission. If confirmed by the European Parliament, she will be the first woman to hold the position. The Council also nominates Charles Michel of Belgium as President of the European Council, Josep Borrell of Spain as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Christine Lagarde of France as President of the European Central Bank. (BBC)
• 2020 United States Census
  • The U.S. Departments of Justice and Commerce announce that the Trump administration will not implement a proposed citizenship question in the 2020 Census, and will perform the census without the question. This follows the U.S. Supreme Court rejecting the administration’s rationale for the question in the case Department of Commerce v. New York. (The Washington Post)
• Following the fatal shooting of a young Ethiopian–Israeli man on June 30, countrywide riots in Israel result in more than 80 injuries. (The Jerusalem Post)

Science and technology

• Solar eclipse of July 2, 2019
  • A total solar eclipse is visible from parts of Chile and Argentina, and a large remote stretch of the southern Pacific.
• Ascent Abort-2
  • NASA carries out a successful in-flight test of the launch abort system of its new Orion spacecraft, a milestone in the development of the Artemis program to resume human exploration beyond low Earth orbit. (Space.com)

News from Wikipedia – please support this valuable resource