“The same weather could lead to extreme events in a warmer world.”
A new study shows heatwaves in the USA and Canada and floods in Germany – devastating records are becoming more likely with climate change.
Severe heat wave in California in July 2021: A firefighter battles the massive fire in Doyle. The fire spread from the burning forests in the adjacent hills.
Photo: Noah Burger (AP)
Residents of the Pacific coast of the northwestern United States and Canada were not prepared for this. The inhabitants of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate did not think about it. The force of nature caught her unprepared. In the Canadian village of Lytton in British Columbia, nearly 50 degrees were measured, in Eifel, 158 liters of rain per square meter fell in 24 hours. ETH climate researcher Eric Fisher talks about “broken records”.
Extreme heat wave in California in July 2021: boats on the shores of Lake Oroville, whose water level has fallen by 70%.
Photo: Getty Images
He knows what he’s talking about. Together with colleagues from ETH Zurich, he has just published climate data in the specialist journal Nature Climate Change, which sheds new light on future climate protection for authorities, engineers and architects. “Essentially, people orient themselves to events that they themselves and perhaps their ancestors experienced,” Fisher says. Extreme events, which, statistically, only happen every 500 to 1,000 years today, as in some places in the USA, Canada and Germany in the past few weeks, are mostly ignored. But even such extreme events, which have been very rare until now, could become normal in a warmer world. This is what the results of the ETH researchers showed.
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