EUROPE IS CURRENTLY in the midst of a searing heatwave that is bringing record-breaking temperatures and raging wildfires across the continent.
Thousands of people have been evacuated in Greece, France, Portugal and Spain as firefighters battle to contain wildfires, while a number of people, including several emergency personnel, have died in the blazes.
In the UK, the temperature provisionally exceeded 40°C for the first time in recorded history on Tuesday, leading to unprecedented wildfires that have destroyed several homes and buildings in London and other parts of England.
On Monday, Ireland recorded its hottest temperature in 135 years, with the Met Éireann measuring site at Phoenix Park topping out at 33°C.
While warm weather at this time of the year is not unusual, and has been recorded in the past, its intensity is in line with warnings from experts that climate change is amplifying extreme weather events.
Speaking to The Journal, postdoctoral researcher at Maynooth University Dr Clare Noone said the weather we are seeing is evidence of the effects of a changing climate.
“As the planet warms, the extreme heat now begins earlier in the year and stretches later, so heatwaves are getting longer, stronger and more frequent and that’s due to climate change and our usage of fossil fuels. We’re seeing record breaking temperatures, and we’re also seeing climate induced air pollution that impacts health and devastating wildfires,” she said.
“This is just the pattern and it will continue to get worse for as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels.”
Dangerous heatwaves have occurred in Europe in the past. In 2003, a record-breaking heatwave across the continent led to forests being destroyed by fires. The estimation of forest areas destroyed reached 647,069 hectares.
It also decreased the quantity and quality of crop harvests, which combined with drought, created a crop shortfall in parts of central and southern Europe.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimated 72,000 deaths related to the event.
A report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) earlier this year made clear that climate change is causing severe and widespread disruption around the world.
The report found that between 3.3-3.6 billion people – around half of the world’s population – are vulnerable to climate change.
It found that the number of deaths and people at risk of heat stress in Europe will increase two-to threefold at 3ºC compared with 1.5ºC.
Another recent study in Science found that a person born in 1960 will only experience four major heat waves in their life, while a child born in 2020, even under the 1.5°C target, will experience 18.
“For each +0.5°C of global warming, the number doubles,” Noone said.
“But we can still avoid deadly heatwaves becoming the new normal by limiting the warming to 1.5°, but we need to take more ambitious climate action now for that to happen.”
Peter Thorne, climatologist and professor at Maynooth University, told The Journal that Ireland will also see the effects of climate change worsen in the near future.
“33.1°C has been reliably measured in Dublin. Regardless of whether it’s a national record, it’s the warmest that’s been reliably measured in Dublin. If you look more broadly across France, the UK, parts of Germany as well as Ireland, so many stations are breaking monthly or all-time records. This is not remotely normal,” he said.
“This is entirely consistent with what we’ve observed to date and what we expect to happen as climate change continues its course. I mean even that 33.3°C, if Met Éireann maintain that it must be the record, that’s going to break sooner rather than later. It’s just a matter of time and where it would be broken.”
UPDATE: June 2022 tied with June 2020 for the warmest June globally since modern recordkeeping began in 1880, measuring at 0.91°C (1.64°F) above the 1951-1980 baseline average. The four most recent Junes have also been the hottest:https://t.co/AKvhatrHCO @NASAGISS pic.twitter.com/oCfsAqd832
— NASA Climate (@NASAClimate) July 18, 2022
Thorne said that some of the weather extremes we have experienced in Ireland have been made worse or are happening more frequently due to climate change, including hotter temperatures and flooding.
He said this does not just apply to the current heatwave, but also coastal surge flooding that has recently occurred in Galway and Cork.
“The coastal surge will be a function of sea level, which will take hundreds of years to play out, even if we stop emitting today, whereas temperature and precipitation, rainfall, they will stabilise quite quickly once we stop emitting greenhouse gases, but unless and until we stop emitting heat trapping gases, and we’re going the wrong way right now, this will continue to get worse,” he said.
“Maybe not next summer, maybe not the summer after that, but in a summer within the next decade or two… we will have heat extremes that are probably far worse in either duration, extent or magnitude than we are seeing right now, which is very much a flash, two or three-day heatwave.
It’s only a matter of time until we see something much worse unless we resolve to stop our heat-trapping gases emissions.
In May, a report from the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) warned that the last seven years were the hottest on record, global sea levels reached a new record high in 2021, and greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have reached record levels.
Noone pointed out that there are several knock-on effects from the high temperatures, such as air pollution.
“Wildfire events occur near populated areas, and they cause severe air pollution episodes that directly impact human health. Heatwaves can make ozone or what you might know as smog worse, and it’s a very dangerous pollutant and especially dangerous for people with asthma or children or older people,” she said.
It can also have a direct impact on crop production. A 2017 study estimated that each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature will reduce global yields of wheat by 6%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.
The Government is currently preparing to approve specific targets for individual sectors that detail how much they must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by as part of Ireland’s efforts to protect the climate.
Noone said that climate change is an intergenerational problem that needs to be treated with urgency and respect “by all members of society”.
“We can’t just leave this to the younger generation to fix. We need to show up for our kids, our actions today will impact their future and it is not the future they want or deserve.”
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