STORY CONTINUES BELOW THESE SALTWIRE VIDEOSBRUSSELS - Europe is once again battling scorching temperatures this summer, with wildfires blazing across the continent from the Mediterranean to Spain. Here's how climate change drives these events.Climate change makes heatwaves hotter and more frequent. This is the case for most land regions, and has been confirmed by the United Nations' global panel of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
But other conditions affect heatwaves too. In Europe, atmospheric circulation is an important factor.To find out exactly how much climate change affected a specific heatwave, scientists conduct"attribution studies". Since 2004, more than 400 such studies have been done for extreme weather events, including heat, floods and drought - calculating how much of a role climate change played in each.
On average on land, heat extremes that would have happened once every 10 years without human influence on the climate are now three times more frequent, according to ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne. A heatwave that occurred once per decade in the pre-industrial era would happen 4.1 times a decade at 1.5 C of warming, and 5.6 times at 2 C, the IPCC says.
Without human-induced climate change, the extreme weather experienced across the world this summer would have been extremely rare, according to a study by World Weather Attribution. The study found that human-induced climate change played an absolutely overwhelming role in the extreme heatwaves that swept across North America, Europe and China in July.Forest management and ignition sources are also important factors.