The unusual heat wave that hit southwestern Canada and the northwestern United States with record temperatures last week would have been “near impossible” had the planet not been plunged into a process of climate change fueled by the greenhouse gases it emits. This is the conclusion of an explicit analysis conducted by scientists from the World weather attribution (WWA), an international group dedicated to analyzing the impact of global warming on extreme weather events. The researchers warn that as climate change accelerates, events as rare as this wave will become “much less rare.”

The heat wave on the Pacific coast of North America, which killed hundreds and was accompanied by severe wildfires, has emerged from all historical temperature tables. Because, as the authors of this report point out, it’s not normal for temperatures to exceed 45 degrees in the latitudes where the heat wave occurred.

In the small Canadian town of Lytton (with about 250 inhabitants and at a latitude similar to that of Berlin), according to the local press 49.6 degrees was recorded – in Spain the temperature record was recorded in Montoro (Córdoba) in 2017 and it was 47, 3 degrees—. “The observed temperatures were so extreme that they are far from the historically observed temperature range,” explain the authors of this explicit analysis.

Reports attributing extreme events to climate change often analyze the data to find out how likely they would have occurred without global warming. In the case of the heat wave on the Pacific coast of the US and Canada, the probability was 150 times greater due to climate change.

“Climate change is making extremely rare events like this more common. We are entering unknown territory. The temperatures experienced in Canada last week would have broken records in Las Vegas or Spain,” Sonia Seneviratne, of the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate Sciences, in Zurich, and one of the authors of the analysis, said in a statement. .

The researchers also conclude that this heat wave was about two degrees warmer than if it had occurred at the beginning of the industrial revolution, that is, before humans began to use fossil fuels on a large scale. emission of greenhouse gasses.

While the heat wave was still active, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned it was an “exceptional and dangerous” phenomenon. The WMO did not establish a direct relationship between this phenomenon and climate change, but recalled that scientific studies indicate an increase in waves due to global warming.

The WWA researchers are pushing for the same idea when pointing out that as warming progresses, waves like last week’s will become much less rare. These scientists claim that the climate crisis is leading humanity to a new scenario “that has significant impacts on health, well-being and way of life”. That is why they are calling for measures to be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the effects of global warming that is currently irreversible, so that society is prepared “for a very different future”.

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