{"id":11541,"date":"2025-09-12T10:18:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/11541\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T10:18:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:18:09","slug":"study-links-frequent-severe-heat-waves-to-pollution-from-major-fossil-fuel-producers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/11541\/","title":{"rendered":"Study links frequent, severe heat waves to pollution from major fossil fuel producers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change<\/a>, according to a study published Wednesday. <\/p>\n

Planet-warming emissions<\/a> from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level. <\/p>\n

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt just shows that it\u2019s not that many actors \u2026 who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,\u201d said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study’s contributors. <\/p>\n

The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database<\/a>, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren\u2019t suitable for their analysis. <\/p>\n

Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found. Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialization began accelerating in the 1800s. The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves \u201cwould have been virtually impossible\u201d without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of these heat waves had very strong consequences,\u201d said Seneviratne. She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths<\/a> sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences. <\/p>\n

Climate scientists can use complex computer programs and historic weather data to calculate the connection between extreme weather events<\/a> and the planet-warming pollutants humans emit. Climate change attribution studies often focus on how climate change influenced a specific weather event, but the scientists say this new Nature study is unique because it focused on the extent to which cement and fossil fuel producers have contributed to heat waves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are drawing on a pretty well-established field of attribution science now, which has existed for about 20 years,\u201d said Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. Callahan has used similar attribution methodologies in his research and said the new study is appropriate and high-quality.<\/p>\n

Scientists say the new study could be taken into consideration in legal cases. Globally, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies<\/a> by climate activists, American state governments and others seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in climate change.<\/p>\n

For example, Vermont<\/a> and New York<\/a> have passed laws that aim to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and the damage caused.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that\u2019s not true,\u201d said Callahan.<\/p>\n

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings provide insight into the origins of the heat waves and how potential hazards from them could be minimized in the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we contend with these losses, the assessment of who or what\u2019s responsible is going to become really important,\u201d Mankin said. \u201cI think there are some really appropriate questions, like who pays to recoup our losses, given that we\u2019re all being damaged by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

The Associated Press\u2019 climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards<\/a> for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11542,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[12356,127,114,3667,1477,5410,12354,242,5412,122,12355,85,46,11111,141,917,1481,126],"class_list":["post-11541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-12356","tag-article","tag-business","tag-climate-and-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-science","tag-energy-industry","tag-environment","tag-environmental-science","tag-general-news","tag-heat-waves","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-pollution","tag-science","tag-u-s-news","tag-weather","tag-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11541\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}