A heatwave continues to grip large parts of Europe, with authorities in many countries issuing health warnings amid searing temperatures.
Southern Spain is the worst-affected region, with temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius recorded in Seville and neighbouring areas.
A new heat record for June of 46C was set on Saturday in the town of El Granado, according to Spain’s national weather service, which also said this month is on track to be the hottest June on record.
Not that hard after all.
From a scientific point of view this is correct, the climate system is too complex to say this particular event is due to climate change. Exceptional events happened in the past too. So you can only draw conclusions from larger statistics. What’s solid science is the increasing averages, increasing frequencies of extreme events etc. If it was scientifically informed, that’s what this kind of sentence mean.
It started out hotter than it would be and the heatwave is at least a few degrees more severe than it would be otherwise.
Scientists do actually make attempts to investigate the contribution of the trends to specific events, it’s called extreme event attribution, but it is a very young field and the error bars on everything are still huge. That said,
But the quote from the article was strictly correct in saying “it’s hard”.
That sentence perfectly states the difficulty though. The trend: easy to link. One individual event: not that easy.
We cant link this unusual weather to Climate change… but its unusual weather thats never been seen before at this frequency or ferocity. Its a mystery~!
man if only there was a way to link the changing climate to climate change
There’s a basic assumption that the climate of an area is fixed. We don’t really have a good mechanism for adjusting the climate of an area quickly. But eventually you have to say that the weather hasn’t been hotter than normal for a decade, this is just the new normal.
“It’s hard to link changes in climate to climate change”
Is the author stupid?
No, individual extreme events are not “changes in climate”. It’s easy to say that the rise in heatwaves is caused by climate change but it’s much harder to prove that this specific individual heatwave would never have happened were it not for climate change.
The average global temperature has been rising steadily with greenhouse gas emissions, for over 50 years, but sure we’ll just ignore that and say it’s impossible to know.
We only have the one planet, sometimes you can’t get multiple data sets. But you can certainly study the things that are happening and make predictions based on that.
No, you’re missing the point. We have conclusively “linked changes in climate to climate change” as your comment eloquently put it. That’s not really up for debate. But weather systems are extremely complex and extreme events have always occurred. So you can’t say that this one specific heatwave is caused only because of this trend.
When it comes to the urgency of doing something about it, that doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely sufficient to say “this type of event will occur increasingly often” to establish that it is an existential crisis. You don’t have to be able to prove anything at all about this one very hot week in order to say that it is probably the single most important issue for us to tackle (along with the politics that prevent us from doing that).
But we don’t have the science and statistics to generally link individual events to a trend in isolation, and we shouldn’t misrepresent the science that way.