human caused global warming It made July warmer for four out of five people on Earth, with more than 2 billion people feeling the heat driven by climate change daily, according to a lightning study.
According to a new report released Wednesday by Climate Center, a non-profit scientific organization that has discovered a way to calculate how much climate change has affected daily weather.
“We really are experiencing climate change almost everywhere,” said Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president of science.
The researchers looked at 4,711 cities and found fingerprints of climate change in 4,019 of them for July, which other scientists Said it’s the hottest month on record. The new study calculated that burning coal, oil and natural gas had made those cities three times more likely to be hotter on at least one day. In the United States, where the climate effect was greatest in Florida, more than 244 million people felt increased heat due to climate change during July.
For 2 billion people in a mostly tropical belt around the world, climate change made it three times more likely to be hotter every day in July. Those include the million-person cities of Mecca, Saudi Arabia and San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
The day with the most pervasive climate change effect was July 10, when 3.5 billion people experienced extreme heat that bore the fingerprints of global warming, according to the report. That’s different from the hottest day globally, which was July 7, according to the Climate Reanalyzer at the University of Maine.
The study is not peer-reviewed, the gold standard for science, because the month just ended. It is based on peer-reviewed climate fingerprinting methods used by other groups and is considered technically valid by the National Academy of Sciences. Two outside climatologists told The Associated Press they found the study credible.
Over a year ago, Climate Central developed a measurement tool called the Climate Change Index. Calculates the effect, if any, of climate change on temperatures around the world in real time, using forecasts, observations, and computer simulations from Europe and the US. To find if there is an effect, scientists compare recorded temperatures with a simulated world with no warming from climate change and is about 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) colder to find out the chances that the heat is natural.
“By now, we should all be used to individual heat waves being connected to global warming,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a climatologist at Princeton University who was not part of the study. “Unfortunately, this month, as this study elegantly shows, has given the vast majority of people on this planet a taste of the impact of global warming in extreme heat.”
In the United States, 22 US cities had at least 20 days where climate change tripled the likelihood of additional heat, including Miami, Houston, Phoenix, Tampa, Las Vegas, and Austin.
The US city most affected by climate change in July was Cape Coral, Florida, where fossil fuels made higher temperatures 4.6 times more likely during the month and had 29 of 31 days in which there was a significant imprint of climate change.
The further north the United States, the less weather effect was observed in July. The researchers found no significant effect in places like North Dakota and South Dakota, Wyoming, northern California, upstate New York, and parts of Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
Heat waves in the American Southwest, the Mediterranean, and even China have received special scrutiny from World Weather Attribution finds a sign of climate changeBut places like the Caribbean and the Middle East are seeing big signs of climate change and they’re not getting any attention, Pershing said. Unlike the other study, this one looked at the entire globe.
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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears
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