Axios - The world's hottest summer on record had strong fingerprints of human-caused global climate change at the local levels, according to a new data analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central. Heat is one of the deadliest types of extreme weather, having claimed more than 2,000 lives in the U.S. last year alone. Climate Central used its Climate Shift Index, which seeks to peg climate change's influence on daily average temperatures, to analyze human-caused climate change's role in generating dangerous heat.
- They found that one in four people globally had no break this summer from intense heat that climate change made at least 3 times more likely compared to the preindustrial era.
- Global exposure to such climate change-driven heat peaked on Aug. 13, the analysis shows, when 4.1 billion people worldwide experienced temperatures at that three times more likely threshold.
The average person experienced 17 more days of "risky heat" due to climate change than they otherwise would have, the analysis shows.
- Such days are defined as having high temperatures hotter than 90% of the temperatures recorded there during the 30-year span between 1991-2020.
Residents of Longyearbyen, on the island of Svalbard, Norway, far above the Arctic Circle, experienced their hottest August and hottest August day on record, with a high of 68°F.
- Such unusual heat had major consequences, leading to some of the fastest-melting of the islands' thinning glaciers yet recorded.
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