London: This year is on track to be the warmest ever recorded in Europe, and greenhouse gas emissions played a major role, according to new research.
A team of researchers at Oxford found that the odds of such a warm year in this country had increased by ten. Scientists from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the University of Melbourne and the Australian National University found that the likelihood of such warm temperatures across Europe was 35 to 80 times greater because of climate change.
Myles Allen, professor at Oxford University, told the Guardian that his group was working on much smaller areas than the other researchers, and was still able to detect a clear signal of climate change.
Heating up
“We are using regional climate models to zoom in on smaller areas than the other groups, and it is interesting that even on the scale of the UK, we are seeing a substantial impact of human influence on climate on the odds of such a warm year,” he said.
While the science of global warming has been understood for many years — the comprehensive 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set out the certainty that climate change was occurring and caused in the main by human activity — it has always been difficult to tie specific events such as heatwaves, storms or floods, to climate change.
That is because such events also happen naturally, though less frequently than they would under a warming climate.
Cooling conversations
Global efforts to combat climate change are continuing.
Last week, governments meeting at the UN’s annual climate change conference, held in Lima, agreed a framework for curbing the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, before a new global climate agreement that is supposed to be signed at another major conference next year in Paris.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd.
