In late June, Portland, Oregon, experienced its hottest day on record, reaching 42° Celsius (108° Fahrenheit). The last time it had been this hot was in 1981, when temperatures soared to 41°C (107°F). The very next day, the record was broken again, but this time by an even higher margin at 44°C (112°F).

Other parts of the Pacific Northwest roasted and broiled as well. On June 30, the town of Lytton in British Columbia, Canada, reached a dangerous peak of 49°C (121°F), which helped fuel a wildfire that essentially razed the entire town.

A new paper published July 26 in Nature Climate Change provides some sobering news for the future: these record-shattering heat events are set to become more common and more intense as global temperatures continue to rise over the coming decades due to human-induced climate change.

“We are arguing that in the coming decade or two, we should definitely expect to see more frequent and higher-intensity events, meaning that records are broken by larger margins,” lead author Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich, told Mongabay in an interview. “What happens after that depends on our emissions and whether we are able to bring the emissions rapidly down.”

Fischer and his colleagues took a different methodological approach to previous studies on the subject. Instead of looking at extreme heat waves as anomalies relative to common temperature means, they measured the intensity of the events by the margin at which they broke previous records. They argue that these events tend to happen at times of accelerated warming, and that these extreme heat events would generate the greatest impacts the first time they occurred at a certain location.

Using climate models that took a high-emissions scenario into account, the researchers found that weeklong heat extremes that break previous records would be two to seven times more likely in the mid-latitudes between 2021 and 2050, with about a 6 per cent chance of these events happening each year. The models also showed that extreme heat was three to 21 times more probable between 2051 and 2080 when compared to the preceding three decades, with a 17 per cent chance of these events each year. This suggests that after the year 2050, we could be seeing heat extremes about every six years.

Read the full article about intense weather due to climate change by Elizabeth Claire Alberts at Eco-Business.