GENEVA, Aug 23: As Europe and other regions swelter, a UN researcher cautioned that climate change was enabling increasingly intense and long-lasting heatwaves, which in some areas could soon begin to hit year-round.
Extreme heat has dominated the headlines in recent weeks, from the current "heat dome" cooking much of Europe, to heat-fuelled wildfires raging in Greece, Spain, Canada and Hawaii, and soaring temperatures in the middle of the South American winter.
Heatwaves are beginning earlier, lasting longer and becoming more intense, John Nairn, a senior extreme heat advisor at the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO), told AFP in an interview.
"It's the most rapidly emerging consequence of global warming that we are seeing in the weather systems," he said, stressing that this was in line with scientific predictions.
"People are far too relaxed about the signs," he lamented.
"The science has been saying this is coming your way. And this is not where it stops."
"It will only get more intense and more frequent."
One reason, he explained, was that global warming appears to be leading to a weakening of the global jet streams -- air that flows high in the Earth's atmosphere.
As the jet stream waves grow slower and wavier, they allow weather systems to "become parked" in one spot for longer.
"You can get a summertime situation where you get persistent heatwaves, and the heat just builds and builds and builds, because the wave is not moving on," Nairn said. AFP
