[MCN] Does increased atmospheric CO2 affect heat waves?

[Lance Olsen]

Heatwaves are becoming more widespread, last longer, and are getting more extreme (e.g. Keellings and Waylen, 2014) <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/08/are-the-heatwaves-caused-by-climate-change/#ITEM-21575-0>. 

This trend has been predicted and reported in multiple reports, such as the IPCC SREX (2013) <http://www.ipcc.ch/report/srex/>, the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (e.g. Palmer, 2009) <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/08/are-the-heatwaves-caused-by-climate-change/#ITEM-21575-1>, and European Academy Science Advisory Council (EASAC, 2013 <http://www.dnva.no/binfil/download.php?tid=58783>). 

Climate change is equivalent to changing weather statistics, and one line of evidence includes the nature of record-breaking events <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/11/on-record-breaking-extremes/>. We can find evidence in both the number[a] and the magnitude of new record-breaking values.

Coumou et al., (2013) <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/08/are-the-heatwaves-caused-by-climate-change/#ITEM-21575-2> observed an increase in the global number of monthly heat records that corresponded to what one should expect if the temperatures increased everywhere by the same rate as the global mean. They also found that local monthly records are on average five times as frequent as they would be in a stationary climate. In other words, four out of five new heat records would not have occurred without global warming.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=21575 <http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=21575>
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“The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.”

Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. 

The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.”

<<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html>>>






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