A new study has found that last year’s extreme heat in the northern hemisphere, which caused wildfires to spread to the Mediterranean Sea, cut highways in Texas and cut power grids in China, was not only the hottest summer, but also the hottest. 2,000 years, according to Reuters.
The startling finding is based on one of two new studies released Tuesday on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists say June to August last year was the hottest since records began in the 1940s.
A new study published in the journal Nature found that the 2023 heat wave could exceed temperatures even longer. The study looked at temperature data from tree-ring surveys at nine northern locations and meteorological records dating back to the mid-1800s.
“When you look at the length of history, you can see how important global warming is today,” said Esan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany who is an author on the paper.
Last year, summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere between 30 and 90 degrees Celsius were 2.07 degrees Celsius (3.73 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average, the study found.
The summer of 2023 was 2.2 C (4 F) above the average since 1890, according to tree-ring data.
The result was completely unexpected. In January, researchers from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Agency concluded that 2023 is very likely to be the hottest year in nearly a million years.
Esper said such a long record could not be proven. In a paper published last year, he and two other European scientists said that current scientific methods, which involve taking temperature data from sources such as sea sediments or peat bogs, cannot make year-to-year comparisons over large time scales.
“We don’t have that information,” Esper said. “That’s an exaggerated word.”
The El Nino weather pattern, which usually coincides with global warming, was exacerbated by last year’s heat wave, “leading to a longer and more intense heat wave and drought.”
Between 1990 and 2019, more than 150,000 deaths in 43 countries were attributed to heat waves each year, according to a second study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine. The heat wave has taken its toll on public health.
This is equivalent to 1% of all deaths in the world or the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 50% of the additional heat wave-related deaths occurred in densely populated Asia.
With an average of 655 heat-related deaths per 10 million people per year, Europe has the highest number of heat-related deaths per capita when the data is adjusted for population size. Greece, Malta and Italy have the highest death tolls in the region.
Extreme heat can cause heatstroke, breathing problems and heart problems.
