The Past Decade’s Emissions Are Already Driving Worse Heat Waves in Europe

The heat waves Europe has seen in recent years were made measurably more intense because of the greenhouse gasses emitted since the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, according to a new study published today in Geophysical Research Letters. “We found that the emissions released since the signing of this Paris Agreement in 2015 have substantially and significantly increased the intensity of Europe's recent individual heat waves,” says lead author Jared Trok, a PhD student in Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. The study also determined that that held true for Europe’s hottest week in every individual year since at least 2021.Their findings come on the heels of this summer's back-to-back heat waves on the continent, which broke heat records and contributed to at least 35,000 excess deaths. The Paris Agreement was a legally binding international treaty on climate change adopted by nearly 200 countries in December 2015, with the aim of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures. A decade later, the world is expected to blow past that 1.5°C target, with optimistic estimates finding that temperatures will peak at 1.8°C under current cli...