Climate Crisis To Blame For Formerly 'Impossible' Heat, Studies Reveal

At least 24 previously impossible heatwaves have struck communities across the planet, a new assessment has shown, providing stark evidence of how severely human-caused global heating is supercharging extreme weather.

- Damian Carrington

These heatwaves have taken lives across North America, Europe and Asia, with analyses showing they would have had almost zero chance of happening without the extra heat trapped by fossil fuel emissions.

Studies have assessed how much worse global heating has made the consequences of extreme weather. Millions of people, and many thousands of newborn babies, would not have died prematurely without the extra human-caused heat, according to the estimates.

In total, studies calculating the role of the climate crisis in what are now unnatural disasters show 550 heatwaves, floods, storms, droughts and wildfires have been made significantly more severe or more frequent by global heating. This roll call of suffering is only a glimpse of the true damage, however. Most extreme weather events have not been analysed by scientists.

The new database of hundreds of studies that analyse the role of global heating in extreme weather was compiled by the website Carbon Brief and shared with the Guardian. It is the only comprehensive assessment and provides overwhelming proof that the climate emergency is here today, taking lives and livelihoods in all corners of the world.

The studies have examined the impacts resulting from about 1.3C of global heating to date. The prospect of 2.5C to 3.0C, which is where the world is headed, is therefore catastrophic, warn the scientists. They urge the world's leaders meeting at the Cop29 climate summit in Azerbaijan to deliver deep and rapid cuts to carbon emissions and to fund the protection desperately needed by many communities against now inevitable climate disasters.

The science of determining the role of global heating in extreme weather events is called attribution.