Study links more frequent heat waves to pollution from fossil fuel producers

Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according toa study published Wednesday.

- By ISABELLA O'MALLEY Associated Press

Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57 percent of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.

“Tt just shows that it’s not that many actors ... who are responsible foravery strong fraction ofall emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study's contributors.

The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren't suitable for their analysis.