More record-breaking heat waves predicted
The forest fires, crop losses, water shortages and deaths brought by last summer’s Europe-wide heat wave may become more frequent phenomena, according to new research.
The record breaking temperatures, five degrees Celsius above long-term averages, can be explained in terms of increased fluctuations in weather between one summer and the next, according to scientists from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at the ETH Zurich, and from MeteoSwiss.
Professor Christoph Schar suggests in a Nature paper that climate change will not only bring higher average temperatures, but increased variability around the average.
He predicts that by the year 2100, very hot summers may become the rule rather than the exception.
‘Our simulations show that, roughly speaking, every second European summer is likely to be as warm, if not warmer, than the summer of 2003. The same applies for the low precipitation amounts’, Professor Schar relates.
This brings yet more problems for those struggling to adapt to climate change. Farmers can alter their crop choices in response to increases in temperature, but dealing with increasingly variable weather is far more of a problem. Eco-systems will face similar problems.
The research is published after a week of grave warnings about the impact of climate change. Another Nature paper predicted that over the next fifty years global warming will bring extinction of a quarter of all land animal and plant species. Because of the fragmentation of habitats and populations, organisms may not be able to adapt to the changing climatic conditions, according to the researchers from Leeds University.
Further, the impact of the repercussions of climate change should not be underestimated, the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King has warned. Writing in Science magazine he has claimed that unless global action is taken, climate change is a more ‘severe’ threat to the world’s long-term future than international terrorism.
