Health warnings have been issued across many parts of Europe as temperatures soar to the mid-40s Celsius.

A heatwave continues to grip large parts of Europe, with authorities in many countries issuing health warnings amid searing temperatures.

Southern Spain is the worst-affected region, with temperatures in the mid-40s Celsius recorded in Seville and neighbouring areas.

A new heat record for June of 46C was set on Saturday in the town of El Granado, according to Spain’s national weather service, which also said this month is on track to be the hottest June on record.

  • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    6 hours ago

    No, individual extreme events are not “changes in climate”. It’s easy to say that the rise in heatwaves is caused by climate change but it’s much harder to prove that this specific individual heatwave would never have happened were it not for climate change.

    • Zron@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      6 hours ago

      The average global temperature has been rising steadily with greenhouse gas emissions, for over 50 years, but sure we’ll just ignore that and say it’s impossible to know.

      We only have the one planet, sometimes you can’t get multiple data sets. But you can certainly study the things that are happening and make predictions based on that.

      • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        6 hours ago

        No, you’re missing the point. We have conclusively “linked changes in climate to climate change” as your comment eloquently put it. That’s not really up for debate. But weather systems are extremely complex and extreme events have always occurred. So you can’t say that this one specific heatwave is caused only because of this trend.

        When it comes to the urgency of doing something about it, that doesn’t matter. It’s absolutely sufficient to say “this type of event will occur increasingly often” to establish that it is an existential crisis. You don’t have to be able to prove anything at all about this one very hot week in order to say that it is probably the single most important issue for us to tackle (along with the politics that prevent us from doing that).

        But we don’t have the science and statistics to generally link individual events to a trend in isolation, and we shouldn’t misrepresent the science that way.