Theoccurrence of extreme monthly temperatures has become more frequent in the last decade, as indicated by the measurements taken around the globe and analyzed by a team of researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), which publishes their conclusions in the journal Climatic Change.
According to the new research,Record-breaking warm months are, on average, five times more than you might expectwithout the upward trend caused by climate change. In parts of Europe, Africa, and South Asia, the number of monthly records has even increased by a factor of ten. The80% of these monthly temperature records would not have occurred without human influence on Earth’s climate, as the authors conclude.
In the last decade there have been unprecedented heat waves as is happening now in Australia and already happened in 2009, or as happened in the United States in 2012, in Russia in 2010 or in Europe in 2003. Extreme high temperatures cause major forest fires, crop failures, and even deaths. “Society and ecosystems are not prepared to face each new record of temperatures,” says Dim Coumou, co-author of the work.
The study is supported by theanalysis of data from 131 years of monthly temperatures provided by NASA, recorded at 12,000 points around the world. From these data, the researchers have developed a complex statistical model that explains the increase in the number of extremes as a consequence of the long-term trend in temperatures induced by global warming. This increase has been particularly pronounced over the last 40 years, due to an increase in the trend of climate change. Superimposed on this increase in the mean trend, the data show the effects of natural variability, with a higher number of records in temperatures during the years in which the El Niño phenomenon occurs. However, according to the study researchers, this natural variability does not explain the underlying substantial increase in the number of extremes.
If global warming continues at the observed rate, the research predicts that in 30 years the number of records could be up to 12 times higher than it would be without climate change. But what is more, “if we are in the 2040s, to be considered new records, temperatures will have to surpass those records recorded in the previous two decades, which will meanextremely high temperatures never experienced before“explains Coumou. And this refers to the global average, so this situation will worsen in certain regions of the Earth. As Alexander Robinson, a researcher at the UCM team points out,” the results are another definitive confirmation that the Climate change has already started to have a great effect on society, and that effect will be even more profound in the future. “
According to this research, currently this increase is already so marked that most of the monthly records in temperatures are due to global warming. The data analyzed indicate that only a small part of these extremes would have occurred naturally.
