Heat waves are (and will be) increasingly frequent, long and intense. And virtually all experts agree that the main cause is climate change, combined with warming caused by the natural El Niño event in the Pacific, and exacerbated by the changes in atmospheric circulation in Europeparched soils and rising sea temperatures.
“What is happening can be explained in two words: climate change,” says Isabel Moreno, a meteorologist with the RTVE Here the Earth. “Heat waves are surely the weather phenomenon most easily attributed to climate change. You couldn’t understand so often and so many temperature records every summer if that factor wasn’t behind it.”
Three successive waves of heat (June 23, July 10 and July 17) have hit Spain and the southern Mediterranean since the start of summer. And that without forgetting the episode of extreme heat that caused Córdoba to reach 38.8 degrees at the end of April, until hundred times more likely due to the effect of climate changeaccording to a report by the World Weather Attribution (WWA).
“Behind extreme heat there may always be an element of natural climate variability,” warns German climatologist Friederike Otto, co-founder of WWA. “But the longer, more intense and more frequent heat waves that we are seeing in Europe are mainly caused by climate change. induced by human activity“.
From the observatory at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London, Otto no longer considers it necessary to wait for a new attribution study on this summer’s heat waves to take action: “The role of climate change in what is happening is already sufficiently proven.”