Temperatures would have been four degrees Celsius lower in a world that had not been warmed by human activity, according to historical weather records.
Climate change made the scorching heatwave that swept across the United Kingdom last week ten times more likely, as per the international team of leading climate scientists.
A severe heatwave struck parts of the United Kingdom on July 18-19. Temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius or higher were recorded for the first time in Britain.
In a band stretching from Kent to North Yorkshire, 46 stations met or exceeded the previous record. Scotland recorded a maximum temperature above 35 degrees Celsius for the first time, breaking the last 32.9 degrees Celsius set on August 9, 2003.
The World Weather Attribution group of twenty-one scientists analysed weather data and computer simulations to compare today's climate to the past.
The study concentrated on the maximum temperatures over two days in the UK's most affected region, centred on central England and east Wales. It discovered that human-caused climate change had increased the frequency and magnitude of such events.
The scientists said that determining the exact contribution of climate change has been difficult because extreme heat in Western Europe has increased more than climate models predicted.
Temperatures would have been four degrees Celsius lower in a world that had not been warmed by human activity, according to historical weather records.
According to the researchers, this suggests that models are underestimating the true impact of human-caused climate change on high temperatures in the United Kingdom and other parts of Western Europe.
It also means that the analysis's findings are conservative, and climate change is likely to have increased the frequency of the event by more than a factor of ten, according to the scientists.
In Europe and other parts of the world, record-breaking heatwaves are causing extreme temperatures to rise faster than predicted by most climate models.
It's a concerning finding that suggests that if carbon emissions are not rapidly reduced, the effects of climate change on Europe's already lethal extreme heat could be even worse than previously thought, according to Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial College London's Grantham Institute for Climate Change.
Scientists at the UK Met Office discovered two years ago that the chance of seeing 40 degrees in the UK was now one in 100 in any given year, up from one in 1000 in the natural climate. It's been depressing to see such an event occur so soon after that study, and to see the raw data from our weather stations, said Fraser Lott, Climate Monitoring and Attribution Scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre.
(With inputs from PTI)
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