“It’s been a shocking summer,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “We know most of this is happening because of long-term warming of the climate system so it’s not surprising, sadly, but you still get shocked by these extremes. Records are not just being broken, they are being shattered by wide margins.”
The record temperatures are being driven not only by global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels but also by the onset of El Niño, a periodic climate event that heats up part of the Pacific Ocean, causing temperatures to spike around the world.
“We have seen an unusual summer and these ‘unusual’ summers will become more and more frequent in the future,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at the Nature Conservancy. Hayhoe said high temperatures, El Niño and natural variability have all combined to create the sort of conditions not seen before by humans. “It’s like an overloaded camel with an extra bale of hay and then some additional weight on top,” she said.
After America’s summer of extreme weather, ‘next year may well be worse’ | Climate crisis | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/26/us-summer-extreme-heat-wildfires-climate-crisis