Study links more frequent and severe heat waves to pollution from major fossil fuel producers

Key Points

• A recent study links human-caused climate change to the occurrence of 55 heat waves over the past 25 years, attributing their likelihood significantly to emissions from major fossil fuel and cement producers.
• The research found that these entities are responsible for 57% of total carbon dioxide emissions since 1850, indicating that a small number of contributors have a disproportionate impact on global warming.
• Out of 213 analyzed heat waves, 55 were determined to be 10,000 times more likely to occur due to climate change, underscoring the drastic effects of industrialization since the 1800s.
• This study could influence ongoing legal cases against fossil fuel companies, helping to establish their responsibility in contributing to harmful climate impacts.

Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday.

Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.

“It just shows that it’s not that many actors … who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study's contributors.

The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren’t suitable for their analysis.

Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found. Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialization began accelerating in the 1800s. The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves “would have been virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.

“Many of these heat waves had very strong consequences,” said Seneviratne. She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences.

Scientists calculate how carbon emitters influence heat waves

Climate scientists can use complex computer programs and historic weather data to calculate the connection between extreme weather events and the planet-warming pollutants humans emit. Climate change attribution studies often focus on how climate change influenced a specific weather event, but the scientists say this new Nature study is unique because it focused on the extent to which cement and fossil fuel producers have contributed to heat waves.

“They are drawing on a pretty well-established field of attribution science now, which has existed for about 20 years,” said Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. Callahan has used similar attribution methodologies in his research and said the new study is appropriate and high-quality.

Scientists say the new study could be taken into consideration in legal cases. Globally, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies by climate activists, American state governments and others seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in climate change.

For example, Vermont and New York have passed laws that aim to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and the damage caused.

“For a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that’s not true,” said Callahan.

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist who wasn't involved in the study, said the findings provide insight into the origins of the heat waves and how potential hazards from them could be minimized in the future.

“As we contend with these losses, the assessment of who or what’s responsible is going to become really important,” Mankin said. “I think there are some really appropriate questions, like who pays to recoup our losses, given that we’re all being damaged by it.”

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