Climate change made killer heat wave in Mexico, Southwest US even warmer and 35 times more likely

autotldr Bot , 6 days ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Human-caused climate change dialed up the thermostat and turbocharged the odds of this month’s killer heat that has been baking the Southwestern United States, Mexico and Central America, a new flash study found.

Sizzling daytime temperatures that triggered cases of heat stroke in parts of the United States were 35 times more likely and 2.5 degrees hotter (1.4 degrees Celsius) because of the warming from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, World Weather Attribution, a collection of scientists that run rapid and non-peer reviewed climate attribution studies, calculated Thursday.

And it was even worse at night, which is what made this heat wave so deadly, said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who coordinates the attribution study team.

While other groups of international scientists — and the global carbon emissions reduction target adopted by countries in the 2015 Paris climate agreement — refer to warming since pre-industrial time in mid 1800s, Otto said comparing what’s happening now to the year 2000 is more striking.

They then used the scientifically accepted technique of comparing simulations of a fictional world without human-caused climate change to current reality to come up with how much global warming factored into the 2024 heat wave.

The immediate meteorological cause was a high pressure system parked over central Mexico that blocked cooling storms and clouds, then it moved to the U.S. Southwest and is now bringing the heat to the U.S. East, Winkley said.

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