Heat waves have happened in the past, but climate change is making heat waves longer, more extreme, and more frequent. We know this by observing how often new daily high and low temperature records are set. Daily temperatures are measured at hundreds of weather stations around the globe. In the United States, high and low records at weather stations were set at about the same rate in the s, yet since the late s, the number of record daily high temperatures measured each year has been increasing at a faster rate than record daily low temperatures.
This shift is largely due to far fewer record daily low temperatures in recent decades. That pattern was evident in January , when there were 17 cold record temperatures set around the world and heat record temperatures. Scientists also study extreme event attribution to find out if the warming climate has made an extreme event like a heat wave more severe or more likely to happen. They use computer models to simulate weather conditions with or without global warming and other contributing factors.
By comparing different scenarios, scientists can tell that global warming is making heat waves worse. Worsening heat waves are likely to increase the number of heat-related illnesses and deaths.
By the end of the century, the United States is expected to see thousands of additional heat-related deaths each year because of climate change. Heat waves can be more extreme in cities due to the urban heat island effect , so growing urban populations could contribute to the number of people affected. As the mercury rises, the climate can change in unexpected ways. In addition to sea levels rising, weather can become more extreme. This means more intense major storms, more rain followed by longer and drier droughts—a challenge for growing crops—changes in the ranges in which plants and animals can live, and loss of water supplies that have historically come from glaciers.
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We then compared the warming throughout the 21st Century for both groups. We considered two well-known emissions scenarios taken from the latest IPCC report. The first scenario assumes greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise unabated through the 21st century. The second assumes emissions are reduced to address global warming, peaking by before declining sharply. And the longer the projections go on, the smaller the difference gets. Under the high emissions scenario, for example, the difference in average projected end-of-century warming between the two groups of models is less than 0.
This clearly shows that the impact of the current hiatus is effectively non-existent in the context of long term warming. It is not news to climate scientists that natural variability impacts the short-term movement of global average temperatures in both directions. We have seen short-term pauses and even short-term reversals in global temperature rise in the past century, against the backdrop of an unambiguous long term warming trend. We have also seen periods of more rapid surface atmosphere warming.
In effect the surface warming comes in spurts, facilitated by phase shifts in the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation. And over time, despite the cycles of warming and cooling due to this oscillation, despite solar minima, despite cooling from volcanic eruptions and cooling from the massive loading in the atmosphere of anthropogenic aerosols, the trend in temperatures above the noise clearly continues upwards.
Our research shows that limiting the projections to models that capture the current slowdown in no way alters long-term projections.
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