AI-Summary – News For Tomorrow
A new study focusing on major carbon emitters links their actions to increased heat wave intensity and frequency, raising accountability concerns. Researchers analyzed 213 significant heat waves from 2000-2023, comparing them to pre-industrial climate models. Experts highlight the growing scientific evidence that could hold fossil fuel companies liable for climate damage. The study likely underestimates the true scale of the problem, as many heat waves in the Global South are underreported. One expert noted that denial of climate change will not reduce the increasing risk to life from heat waves.
News summary provided by Gemini AI.
While past studies have mostly looked at emissions from regions and countries, this review focuses on major carbon emitters, said Yann Quilcaille, the report’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich.
“This research is an important step towards accountability,” says Friederike Otto, a professor in climate science at the Imperial College London who wasn’t involved in the study.
A growing body of scientific evidence is “opening the door to hold fossil fuel companies responsible” for the harm that their businesses have caused to communities and ecosystems worldwide, Otto said.
In an accompanying essay published in Nature, Karsten Haustein, a Leipzig University climate scientist not involved in the study, wrote that it “is another reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric won’t make climate liability go away, nor will it reduce the ever-increasing risk to life from heat waves across our planet.”
To calculate how climate change affects the likelihood and intensity of heat waves, the study’s authors analyzed 213 heat waves between 2000 and 2023 that caused significant social and economic disruptions. As WWA does in their analyses of individual events, the researchers used computer models to simulate how the heat waves would have unfolded under a preindustrial climate, compared with current times.
As bad as this may sound, the actual climate damage caused by the carbon majors may have been even worse. Since many heat waves in parts of the Global South such as Africa and Latin America are underreported and absent from the database, “the study’s findings likely underestimate the true scale of these events, and the real consequences are probably far greater,” Otto said.
Copyright 2025 Bloomberg.
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