A recent heat wave in Siberia that saw temperature records drop as the region grew to 38 degrees Celsius was "almost impossible" without the influence of man-made climate change, prominent scientists said on Wednesday.
An international team of researchers found that the record warm period was more than 2 ° C hotter than it would have been if humans had not warmed the planet through decades of greenhouse gas emissions.
The hottest five years in history have occurred in the past five years and there is a better chance that 2020 is the hottest ever recorded.
Earth's poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, and temperatures in Siberia, home to much of the world's carbon-rich permafrost, were more than 5 ° C higher than the average between January and June.
One city, Verkhoyansk, recorded a temperature of 38 ° C, breaking previous records.
Andrew Ciavarella, a senior detection and attribution scientist at the British Meteorological Office, described the findings as "astonishing".
"This is further proof of the extreme temperatures that we can expect to see more frequently around the world in warmer weather," he said.
The impact of climate change on extreme weather events, such as super storms and droughts, is now well established, but until recently scientists have been unable to definitively link an individual event to global warming.
As part of a growing area of climate research known as attribution science, the team conducted computer simulations of temperatures with the climate as it is today, around 1C warmer than the baseline of the pre-industrial era.
They then compared this to a model that generates temperatures over Siberia this year without human influence - that is, without the additional man-made 1C.
They found that prolonged heat would occur less than once every 80,000 years without human-induced climate change.
This makes the heat wave "almost impossible in a climate that has not been warmed by greenhouse gas emissions," the team said, adding that carbon pollution had caused the extreme event to have at least 600 times more likely to occur.
From NDTV News
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