Nightmare landscape: Severe summer droughts twenty times more likely due to climate change

Human-caused climate change and the resulting rise in temperatures has made severe summer droughts like the ones this year in Europe, North America and Asia (especially China) at least 20 times more likely than they were a century ago, according to a new international scientific study .

The 21 European and American researchers of the World Weather Attribution group, who analyzed worldwide soil moisture during this year’s two months of July-August, according to the “New York Times” and the “Financial Times”, believe that this year’s heatwaves and droughts in many parts of the world would be “virtually impossible” without the factor of climate change and ever-increasing “greenhouse gases”.

The 2022 droughts have dried up major rivers, destroyed agricultural crops and raised the prices of several foods, sparked devastating wildfires, limited hydroelectric production, and led to restrictions on water availability even in Europe.

China in particular experienced its driest summer in 60 years, with the famously huge Yangtze River halved in width.

The study estimates that such droughts once, before climate change, occurred only once every 400 years, while now they are expected to recur in the northern hemisphere (where Greece is included) at least every 20 years, in other words it is 20 times more likely.

Indeed, if the average global temperature rises by another 0.8 degrees Celsius – on top of the 1.2 degrees it has already risen from pre-industrial levels – severe and widespread droughts could occur every ten years, according to climatologist Dominique Schumacher of the ETH polytechnic school of Zurich.

As he said, “with further increases in global temperatures, we can expect even stronger and more frequent summer droughts in the future.”

RES-EMP

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