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"Humans Raise Risk of Europe Heatwaves"
(Source: Reuters, 12/1/04)
LONDON - Human activity has raised the risk of more heatwaves like
last year's, which gave Europe probably its hottest summer since 1500,
scientists said on Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of people in Europe died during the sweltering
weather as the mercury soared to new highs. Unusual meteorological
conditions were blamed for the extremely hot, dry summer. But Peter
Stott, of the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research in
England, said human activity, particularly greenhouse gas emissions,
at least doubled the risk of the unusual event.
"We are responsible for increasing significantly the risk of such
heatwaves, largely through greenhouse gas emissions" Stott told
Reuters.
"If we carry on as usual with emissions, our predictions indicate that
every other year will be as hot as 2003 by the middle of the century,"
he added.
Stott and his colleagues studied climate change throughout the 20th
century. They suspect human influence probably started altering the
climate as far back as the 18th century.
"But it has only been in the last 50 years that the temperature has
really started to accelerate as a result of greenhouse gas emissions,"
Stott said.
The scientists set out to determine the chances of having a European
heatwave like last year's and whether the odds have changed. Using
climate models, they compared what the weather would have probably
been like without any human influences, with simulations that included
the impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
"It showed there was a significant observed warming in Europe that was
associated with increasing greenhouse gas emissions," said Stott, who
reported the findings in the journal Nature.
"We saw that there was a much greater risk of heatwaves now than there
used to be in the pre-industrial climate."
Stott and his colleagues estimated that as much as three-quarters of
the current risk of a heatwave is due to human influence on climate.
In a commentary in the journal, Swiss and German scientists described
the research as a breakthrough because it is the first successful
attempt to detect man-made influence on a specific extreme climate
event.
"The advent of such attributable studies might profoundly affect the
course of international negotiations on ways to mitigate, adapt to and
ultimately pay for the consequences of climate change," said Christoph
Schar, at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich,
and Gerd Jendritzky, of the German Weather Service in Freiburg.
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