"They are often associated with very severe health impacts and often devastating for agriculture, vegetation, and infrastructure," says Kai Kornhuber from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg (Lower Austria) on the effects of the climate crisis.

Extreme Temperatures Increased Regionally More Than Calculated Due to Climate Crisis

Kornhuber and colleagues examined the heatwaves that have occurred worldwide over the past six decades and identified areas where extreme summer heat is increasing much faster than average: "These regions sometimes become real greenhouses," says the researcher. The countries most affected are in northwestern Europe such as Germany, France, England, and the Netherlands, they report. There, heatwave series in the years 2022 and 2023 contributed to more than a hundred thousand deaths. Other very heavily affected regions are Central China, Japan, Korea, the Arabian Peninsula, Eastern Australia, as well as parts of South America and the Arctic. "In September of this year (2024, note), new temperature records were also set in Austria, France, Hungary, Slovenia, Norway, and Sweden," says a press release from IIASA.

Climate Crisis: Climate Models Cannot Predict Extreme Trends Well

Such extreme trends are obviously not well predictable with climate models because they "are the result of physical interactions that we may not fully understand," explained Kornhuber. The excessive temperature increases could have various reasons: For example, more frequently occurring weather conditions that trigger heatwaves, and soil drying would also intensify temperature increases. Other regions of the world, on the other hand, were spared more from the climate crisis than the models prophesied, according to the researchers: These include areas in the interior of the United States of America, Canada, and South America, as well as North Africa, Northern Australia, and Siberia.

(APA/Red)

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