Emissions from the world’s largest fossil fuel and cement producers have been directly linked to a sharp rise in the intensity of heatwaves since the pre-industrial era, a new study has claimed.
The research, published in the prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature, found that the actions of major carbon emitters have made the average heatwave “50 per cent more intense”. It further suggested that emissions from a single large emitter may have contributed to as many as “16 to 53 heatwaves” which, in the absence of global warming, would have been “virtually impossible”.
A team of European researchers, including scientists from ETH Zurich, examined 213 heatwaves recorded between 2000 and 2023 in the Emergency Events Database, among them the searing 2022 heatwave in India. Their analysis focused on the role of 180 major carbon contributors, ranging from oil giants like Saudi Aramco, Russia’s Gazprom and Chevron to coal-reliant economies such as China and India.
“The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850–1900,” the authors wrote. They added that every one of the 180 entities studied “substantially contributed” to climate change that made those 213 heatwaves both more frequent and more severe.
Also read: Climate change to make skies bumpier, warn scientists
The paper described its findings as part of an “attribution study”, a scientific method that quantifies how much climate change has influenced specific events such as heatwaves or extreme rainfall. Such evidence has become increasingly significant in recent years as campaigners and legal experts seek to hold corporations and governments accountable for the damage caused by their emissions.
While attribution studies have previously measured broad impacts of climate change, it remains unusual to directly apportion responsibility to individual companies or national industries. “We, therefore, establish that the influence of climate change on heatwaves has increased, and that all carbon majors, even the smaller ones, contributed substantially to the occurrence of heatwaves,” the researchers said.
The study also traced a steep rise in the likelihood of extreme heat. Human-driven climate change, it said, made a typical heatwave “20 times” more probable during 2000–2009, and “about 200 times” more probable in the following decade.
Overall, it concluded that a quarter of the heatwaves assessed would have been “virtually impossible without climate change”. The emissions of some of the largest carbon producers, it noted, were alone sufficient to enable dozens of such events in the past two decades.
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