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The blistering temperatures engulfing athletes and fans at the Paris Olympics in recent days would have been “virtually impossible” without man-made climate change, leading climate scientists have concluded.
A day after athletes resorted to draping ice bags over their shoulders in temperatures topping 35 degrees Celsius, a World Weather Attribution analysis showed that fossil fuel emissions had made the heat between 2.5 degrees Celsius and 3.3 degrees Celsius hotter.
“Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who co-founded World Weather Attribution, which seeks to determine whether rising global temperatures are causing extreme weather conditions.
“If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3°C cooler and much safer for sport,” Otto added.
The group’s analysis examined the intense heat that has marred the Mediterranean throughout July. From Greece and Italy to Spain and Morocco, the boiling conditions have killed at least 23 people and fueled large forest fires, World Weather Attribution said. In Morocco alone, 21 people died when temperatures hit 48 degrees Celsius earlier this month, although many more deaths may have gone unreported.
“The extreme temperatures reached in July would have been virtually impossible if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels,” the analysis said.
Out of all the extreme weather events intensified by climate change, heat waves are considered to be the deadliest.
The torrid July in Southern Europe followed 13 months of extreme temperatures globally, with each of the last 13 months breaking previous heat records.
World Weather Attribution warned that extreme weather events are “no longer rare,” and are likely to occur every 10 years.
