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An international team of researchers found that the record-breaking warm period was more than 2 degrees hotter than it would have been if humans had not warmed the planet through decades of greenhouse gas emissions.

The five hottest years in history have occurred in the last five years and there’s a better-than-even chance that 2020 will be the hottest ever recorded.

Earth’s poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, and temperatures in Siberia – home to much of the world’s carbon-rich permafrost – were more than 5 degrees hotter than average between January and June. ………

‘Important for everyone’

The team behind the calculations stressed that the Siberian heatwave was a problem for the entire globe. Some 1.15 million hectares of forest going up in flames released millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

At the same time, the wildfires and sustained heatwaves accelerated the region’s permafrost melt. This caused an oil tank built on frozen soil to collapse in May, leading to one of the region’s worst-ever oil spills…….

To keep in line with the 1.5-degree target, the United Nations says global emissions must fall by 7.6 per cent every year this decade.

Sonia Seneviratne, from ETH Zurich’s Department of Environmental Systems Science, said the research showed the heatwave was an example of “extreme events which would have almost no chance of happening” without man-made emissions. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/siberia-heatwave-was-almost-impossible-without-climate-change-scientists-say