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This week, UCLA researchers have released a surprising new discovery as violent temperatures swept through Southern California. The period of heat waves is increasing faster than global warming.
Researchers have discovered that not only is the heat wave getting hotter, but it also gets longer at a rate that accelerates even more as the planet continues to warm.
“Each percentage of degree of warming has more impact than the last percentage,” said UCLA climate scientist David Neelin.
This means that even relatively modest warming can significantly increase the risk of strong and permanent heat waves. This underscores the need to develop strategies that will help keep people, agriculture and infrastructure safe in extreme heat, he said.
“If the rate of warming remains the same, especially with the fastest heat waves, our adaptation speed must occur faster and faster,” Nielin said in a statement.
In Southern California, longer heat waves dry out vegetation and increase the risk of wildfires, Nielin said in an interview. He adds that worsening heat waves also pose a serious threat to agriculture, as many crops die from sustained high temperatures.
The study was published this week in Nature Geoscience and analyzed historical and predicted heat waves around the world by researchers at UCLA and Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Santiago, Chile.
“We found that the longest and rarest heat waves in each region (those that last several weeks) represent the biggest increase in frequency,” Christian Martinez Vilalobos, the study’s lead author and assistant professor of engineering and science at the University of Adolfo Ibañez, said in a statement.
The risk of increasing heatwaves has already been seen this summer, according to the National Marine and Atmospheric Administration, researchers noted that they settled in the eastern US and set new daily heat records in at least 50 cities.
The European heatwave caused at least 1,500 deaths at about the same time, and one study concluded, forcing the rare closure of last week’s Eiffel Tower summit.
And this week, a hot spell came down to Southern California.
Woodland Hills, Lancaster and Palmdale all broke the 100-degree mark on Wednesday, while Palm Springs reached a 118-degree focus, according to the National Weather Service. It is expected to cool off over the weekend, but predictors will predict another round of potentially dangerous heat from next Tuesday through Friday.
According to a UCLA study, this frequent heat wave pattern is more common all over the world.
These changes are the most severe in tropical regions of Southeast Asia, South America and Africa, near the equator, the study says.
This is because each additional degree of warming has a significant effect, as these areas already have hot climates and relatively low temperature variations. For example, the researchers predicted that heat waves that last more than 35 days in Equatorial Africa would occur 60 times more frequently from 1990 to 2014, from 2020 to 2044.
One of the important contributions of this study was the creation of an equation that could confirm the impact of climate change on temperatures around the world.
However, Nielin said further research is needed to predict the impact of longer, hotter, and more frequent heatwaves on variables such as soil moisture and wildfire risk to help urban planners and agricultural industries. He also emphasized the importance of building high-precision weather and climate models to provide timely, accurate heat-related warnings to the public.
But Neelin said the work is at stake by the Trump administration’s cuts to climate change research funding, which has affected key institutions, including NOAA.
“The deprivation and reimbursement of climate and science research will limit the ability to make region-specific forecasts for risk management,” he said. “If it doesn’t, we’ll have far less capacity to adapt to climate change when we need to accelerate our adaptation plans.”
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