Was just on @BBCWorld discussing the extreme heat event in Siberia in the first half of the year. Northern Siberia was around 5 degrees warmer than typical in recent decades, and nearly 7 degrees warmer than during the preindustrial period.
As the new study by the world weather attribution group points out in their new study, what would have been an extremely unlikely one in 60,000-year event in the 1800s before global warming is a 1 in 100 year event now. worldweatherattribution.org/siberian-heatw…
But if emissions continue to increase it will be closer to a 1 in 10 year event by the middle of the century and an average summer for the region in 2100.
Northern Siberia is somewhat unique in that its both one of the fastest warming regions of the world and the region with the highest amount of year-to-year variability. The combination of these two factors can lead to particularly extreme heat events.
But we've seen other regions, like Australia this past (NH) winter, also experience extreme heat that would have been much, much less likely in the absence of human-caused warming.
As the earth warms natural variability doesn't go away; some days, months, and years will be warmer or colder than usual. But when an unusual heat wave happens in an overall warmer world it easily set new records.
The future warming the world experiences is largely up to us. We can decide if we want to keep increasing our emissions and see a world 4C or more warmer, or cut our emissions and limit warming to well-below 2C as nearly every nation in the world agreed to in the Paris Agreement
We've made some progress already; global coal use, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, peaked in 2013. Last year the world got more energy from clean sources – renewables and nuclear – than coal for the first time. Emissions are increasing only half as fast as a decade ago.
But there is a lot more that needs to be done to decarbonize rapidly enough to limit warming to around 2C or below. We need both deployment of existing clean energy technologies and innovation to support new ones in harder to decarbonize sectors of the economy.
