The rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution calculated that climate change might have tripled the death toll from the event.
Days after an intense, record-breaking heat wave sweltered wide swaths of Europe, a group of scientists released a rapid analysis estimating the extent to which climate change might have amplified the heat wave’s death toll.
The World Weather Attribution study was the first of its kind to produce a rapid assessment of deaths linked to climate change from a heat wave, researchers said. They estimate that the influence of climate change may have tripled the death toll.
Records of actual observed deaths during this heat wave will not be available for months, so researchers used historical temperature data and established mortality trends to approximate the number of excess deaths expected to have occurred because of heat. The scientists examined 12 European cities, focusing on the hottest five-day stretch between June 23 and July 2 for each.
“These numbers represent real people who have lost their lives in the last days due to the extreme heat,” said Friederike Otto, a professor of climate science at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and one of the study’s authors.
The researchers used historical temperature data to determine how intense the heat wave would have been in those cities without global warming, and estimated how many deaths would have been expected to occur in that scenario. They used that information to determine how many additional deaths were caused by climate change.
