New South Wales, southeastern Australia, its hottest summer on record in 2017. Temperature records across the central and the eastern parts of Australia were broken, leading the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to issue a Special Climate Statement on the exceptional heat.
In May 2016, an all-time record high temperature of 51°C was recorded in Rajasthan, India, by some accounts the third-highest temperature ever documented globally. What was behind the extreme heat?
The worst bleaching event on record has affected corals across the Great Barrier Reef in the last few months. As of the end of March, a whopping 93% of the reef has experienced bleaching.
With colleagues at the University of Reading, we performed a simple analysis to assess what factors played a role in this record heat, specifically the roles of greenhouse gas emissions associated with global warming, the natural climate oscillation known as El Niño, as well as solar activity and volcanic aerosols.
A team of international scientists says that it is virtually certain that the heatwave that stretched across much of Europe in early July was more likely to happen now than in the past due to climate change.