Pep Canadell
Executive Director of the Global Carbon Project and Senior Research Fellow at the CSIRO Climate Science Centre in Canberra, Australia
The science of attributing the influence of climate change to individual weather extremes is advancing very rapidly. This study, through the use of artificial intelligence, has developed a much faster method for making this attribution compared with the more common method of analysing the results of large climate models with and without the actual accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
This new study, which focuses on the impacts of emissions since the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015, shows that even emissions from the last 10 years alone have already had a clear effect on heatwaves in Europe since 2021, including the most recent ones, which have been more intense and longer-lasting.
These findings serve as an alarming reminder that the vast quantities of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions we are producing have continued to rise globally since we committed to stabilising the climate under the Paris Agreement. The study is yet another call from the scientific community to accelerate the decarbonisation of our economies at a much faster pace than at present.