Climate change made Siberia’s heat wave at least 600 times more likely
The intense heat wave that gripped Siberia during the first half of 2020 would have been impossible without human-caused climate change, a new study finds. Researchers with the World Weather Attribution Network report that climate change made the prolonged heat in the region at least 600 times more likely — and possibly as much as 99,000 times more likely. “We wouldn’t expect the natural world to generate [such a heat wave] in anything less than 800,000 years or so,” climate scientist Andrew Ciavarella of the U.K. Met Office in Exeter, England, said July 14 in a news conference. It’s “effectively impossible without human influence.” The new study, posted online July 15, examined two aspects of the heat wave: the persistence and intensity of average temperatures across Siberia from January to June 2020; and daily maximum temperatures during June 2020 in the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk. Tiny Verkhoyansk made international headlines when it...