Climate change contributed to about four weeks’ worth of sweaty, sweltering weather in New York City between June and August, according to a new study by the climate science nonprofit Climate Central.
Global warming also quadrupled the odds of this month’s unusual late-summer heat wave, the research found.
“The heat that hit New York City around Labor Day had a very significant climate fingerprint,” said Andrew Pershing, who leads research efforts at Climate Central.
And it isn’t a one-off, either: “Those sorts of conditions are the ones that we need to prepare for” going forward, he added.
Extreme heat is on the rise nationwide due to greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels. But it’s especially dangerous in urban areas like New York City, where dense buildings and wide swaths of pavement make hot days feel even hotter. And the combination of the two can be deadly. Dangerously high temperatures kill hundreds of New Yorkers each year, and city data shows that Black New Yorkers are disproportionately affected.
For the new study, researchers used historical data to create two models: one with a climate like our own, and another hypothetical model for a world without human-caused climate change. (Sounds nice!) Then, they compared the probability of each hot day this past summer between the two models. The larger the gap between the probabilities, the more likely that climate change affected that day’s weather.
Climate Central found that between June and August, New Yorkers endured 28 scorching days so statistically improbable that they were likely influenced by climate change. That puts the New York metro area among the cities most affected by climate change in the Northeast region, according to the data.
But these counts are nothing next to the sweltering temperatures seen in southern states. In Texas, Louisiana and Florida, climate change affected months’ worth of weather, data from Climate Central shows. Austin, Texas,…
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