The summer of 2018 is particularly hot and the rest of the year will be as well. As we find ourselves in heat wave alert until September 15, no improvement is to be expected since researchers from the CNRS, the University of Southampton and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, predict that this abnormal warming will continue until 2022. These new predictions, enabled by a novel calculation method, paint an even darker picture of global warming.
While the global warming, due to greenhouse gas emissions, seemed to be on a hiatus since the beginning of the 21st century – a phenomenon known as the “climate hiatus” – a new method of forecasting temperatures has just announced that in the years to come will be even hotter than expected. This predictive system is based on a statistical method which searches, in already existing climate simulations of the 20th and 21st centuries, for similarities in the current state of the climate in order to predict its future.
Even warmer air until 2022
According to this new method, the average air temperature is likely to be abnormally high between 2018 and 2022, beyond the values induced by anthropogenic global warming alone. This observation is particularly reinforced by the low probability of seeing episodes of intense cold. While conversely, the probability of reliving hot weather, such as that of July and August 2018, is very high. We can therefore expect ever greater consequences on mortality and health problems linked to the heat, already the year 2017 was marked by a 5% increase in deaths linked to the heatwave.
The advantage of this new statistical technique is that it gives a reliable forecast, in a few seconds, on a laptop computer, whereas current simulations, carried out by supercomputers, take several days. The researchers wish, in the future, to deploy this method to also predict precipitation or drought.
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