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A study released Thursday found the world is on track to add nearly two months of dangerous superhot days each year by the end of the century, with poorer small countries hit far more than the biggest carbon-polluting nations.
But efforts to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases began 10 years ago Paris The climate agreement has had a significant impact. without them Earth The same study found that an additional 114 days a year would lead to life-threatening excess hot days.
World Weather Attribution, an international collection of climate scientists, and US-based Climate Central teamed up using computer simulations to calculate how much of a difference the historic agreement would have made in terms of one of the biggest climate impacts on people: heat waves.
The report – which has not yet been peer-reviewed but uses established techniques for climate determination – calculated how many superhot days the world and more than 200 countries got in 2015, how many superhot days the Earth gets now and what is projected in two future scenarios.
One scenario is if countries keep their promises to curb emissions and by the year 2100 the world becomes 2.6 Celsius (4.7 Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial times. According to the study, that adds up to 57 extremely hot days to what the Earth now gets. The second scenario is the 4 C (7.2 F) of warming that the world was on track to hit before the Paris agreement. The study found that the number of additional hot days would double.
pain and suffering are coming
“Climate change will cause pain and suffering,” said Climate Central’s vice president. Science Report co-author Christina Dahl. “But if you look at this difference between 4 degrees Celsius of warming and 2.6 degrees Celsius of temperature rise, it reflects the last 10 years and people’s ambitions. And to me, that’s encouraging.”
The study defines superhot days for each location as days that are hotter than 90% of comparable dates between 1991 and 2020. The report said that since 2015, the world has already added an average of 11 superhot days.
“That heat sends people to the emergency room. Heat Kills people,” Dahl said.
The report did not say how many people would be affected by additional dangerously hot days, but co-author Frederick Otto of Imperial College London said “it will certainly be in the thousands or millions, not less.” He said that every year thousands of people die due to heat waves.
Imagine recent heat waves but worse
Thursday’s study calculated that a week-long heat wave in southern Europe in 2023 is now 70% more likely and 0.6 C (1.1 F) warmer than 10 years ago when the Paris agreement was signed. And if the world’s climate-fighting efforts do not increase, a similar heat wave could be 3 C (5.4 F) higher at the end of the century, the report estimates.
The report said that under the current carbon pollution trajectory a heat wave similar to last year’s heat wave in the southwestern United States and Mexico could be 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) higher by the end of the century.
The university said other groups are also finding hundreds of thousands more deaths from recent heat waves in peer-reviewed research, the majority of which are caused by human-caused climate change. Washington Public health and climate scientist Christy Eby, who was not part of Thursday’s report.
More than anything, the data shows how unfair the impacts of climate change seem, even under the less extreme of the two scenarios. Scientists reported how many additional extremely hot days each country is expected to have by the end of the century under that scenario.
Country data shows high heat inequality
The 10 countries that will see the biggest increase in those dangerous summer days are almost all small and dependent on the ocean, including the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Panama and Indonesia. For example, Panama can expect an additional 149 superhot days. Overall the top 10 countries among them produced only 1% of the heat-trapping gases in the air, but they would get about 13% of additional superhot days.
But the top carbon polluting countries, the United States, China and India, are predicted to have only 23 to 30 additional superhot days. They are responsible for 42% of the carbon dioxide in the air, but are achieving less than 1% of the additional extremely hot days.
Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria who was not part of the study team, said, “This report beautifully and clearly reflects what we have been saying for decades. The effects of global warming will disproportionately affect developing countries that have not historically emitted significant amounts of greenhouse gases.” “Global warming is creating another rift between affluent and non-affluent nations; this will ultimately sow the seeds of geopolitical instability.”
The report found that Hawaii and Florida are the US states that will see the largest increase in superhot days by the end of the century under the current carbon pollution trajectory, while Idaho will see the smallest jump.
While the report makes sense, Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Climate Institute, who was not part of the research, said people should not be relieved that we are no longer on the pre-Paris 4-degree warming trajectory because the current track “would still indicate a disastrous future for billions of humans on Earth.”
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