This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The “heat dome” causing scorching temperatures across Western Europe and North Africa, and boiling athletes and spectators at the Olympic Games in Paris, would have been impossible without human-caused global heating, a rapid analysis has found.

Scientists said the fossil-fueled climate crisis made temperatures 4 to 6 degrees F hotter. Such an event would not have happened in the world before global heating but is now expected about once a decade, they said. Continued emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will make them even more frequent, the researchers warned.

“Climate change crashed the Olympics on Tuesday,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and part of the World Weather Attribution group behind the analysis. “The world watched athletes swelter in [95 degree F] heat. If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuels, Paris would have been about [5 to 6 degrees] cooler and much safer for sport.”

“As long as humans burn oil, gas and coal, heatwaves will get hotter and more people will die premature deaths.”

Numerous athletes, including the gymnastics superstar Simone Biles, have suffered in the heat, with one tennis player having called it “crazy” and sailing competitors having worn ice vests to keep cool. Fans watching the beach volleyball near the Eiffel Tower were sprayed with hoses, while misting fountains have been set up at skateboarding and other venues and millions of bottles of water have been handed out at train and Métro stations.

“However, many people across the Mediterranean do not have the luxury of ice-packs, air conditioning or cooling breaks at work,” Otto said. “For these people, extreme heat can mean death.”

The analysis assessed the dangerous heat in July that sent temperatures soaring past 104F in many places, increasing the spread of wildfires in Portugal and Greece and worsening water shortages in Italy and Spain. In Morocco, temperatures reached 118F, with one hospital reporting 21 deaths.

The heat will have caused many more people to die prematurely across the region. But assembling the required data, where it exists, takes time. Extreme heat in the European summer of 2022 is now known to have led to 61,000 early deaths.

Dr Mariam Zachariah, a research associate at Imperial College London, said: “[Our new] analysis helps people understand that climate change is not a distant threat, but an immediate one that is already making life on Earth much more dangerous.”

“We know exactly what we need to do and have the technology and knowledge needed to do it: replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and stop deforestation.”

Heat action plans, which involve early warning systems, water and first aid stations, and changed hours for outdoor workers, have been implemented in France, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, but not yet in Morocco.

The July heatwave was caused by a large-scale high-pressure ridge, often referred to as a “heat dome.” It occurred after 13 months of extreme heat globally, with each of the last 13 months being the hottest ever recorded.

The climate crisis is making all heatwaves hotter, longer and more frequent around the world. The scientists assessed the impact of human-caused global heating on the extreme July heat by comparing how these events have changed between today’s climate, with about 1.3C of global heating, and the cooler preindustrial climate.

The analysis built on studies of heatwaves in the Mediterranean region in April and July 2023, which used weather data and computer climate models. This foundation meant that only weather data was needed for the new analysis, allowing it to be produced almost immediately.

Many hundreds of these attribution studies have now been completed, covering heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, floods, and storms. They include a growing number of otherwise impossible events and demonstrate how human-caused heating has already supercharged extreme weather across the globe.

“As long as humans burn oil, gas and coal, heatwaves will get hotter and more people will die premature deaths,” said Otto. “The good news is that we don’t need some magic solution to stop things from getting worse. We know exactly what we need to do and have the technology and knowledge needed to do it—replace fossil fuels with renewable energy and stop deforestation. The faster we do this, the better.”

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said last week: “I must call out the flood of fossil fuel expansion we are seeing in some of the world’s wealthiest countries.” He spoke a day after the Guardian revealed a surge in fresh oil and gas exploration in 2024 with countries such as the US and the UK leading the charge, handing out a record 825 oil and gas licenses in 2023.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet.

The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years.

The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.

The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world’s oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate—or fatter—slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further.

The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth’s axis of rotation—the north and south poles—to move. Other work has revealed that humanity’s carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates,” said Prof Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Due to our carbon emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years. Whereas the governing processes previously had been going on for billions of years, and that is striking.”

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates.”

Human timekeeping is based on atomic clocks, which are extremely precise. However, the exact time of a day—one rotation of the Earth—varies due to lunar tides, climate impacts and some other factors, such as the slow rebound of the Earth’s crust after the retreat of ice sheets formed in the last ice age.

These differences have to be accounted for, said Soja: “All the data centers that run the internet, communications and financial transactions, they are based on precise timing. We also need a precise knowledge of time for navigation, and particularly for satellites and spacecraft.”

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), used observations and computer reconstructions to assess the impact of melting ice on the length of the day. The rate of slowing varied between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond per century (ms/cy) between 1900 and 2000. But since 2000, as melting accelerated, the rate of change also accelerated to 1.3 ms/cy.

“This present-day rate is likely higher than at any time in the past few thousand years,” the researchers said. “It is projected to remain approximately at a level of 1.0 ms/cy for the next few decades, even if greenhouse gas emissions are severely curbed.” If emissions are not cut, the slowing rate will increase to 2.6 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tides as the single biggest contributor to long-term variations in the length of days, they said.

Santiago Belda of the University of Alicante in Spain, an expert who was not part of the research team, said: “This study is a great advance because it confirms that the worrying loss of ice that Greenland and Antarctica are suffering has a direct impact on day length, causing our days to lengthen. This variation in day length has critical implications not only for how we measure time, but also for GPS and other technologies that govern our modern lives.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The climate crisis is causing the length of each day to get longer, analysis shows, as the mass melting of polar ice reshapes the planet.

The phenomenon is a striking demonstration of how humanity’s actions are transforming the Earth, scientists said, rivalling natural processes that have existed for billions of years.

The change in the length of the day is on the scale of milliseconds but this is enough to potentially disrupt internet traffic, financial transactions and GPS navigation, all of which rely on precise timekeeping.

The length of the Earth’s day has been steadily increasing over geological time due to the gravitational drag of the moon on the planet’s oceans and land. However, the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets due to human-caused global heating has been redistributing water stored at high latitudes into the world’s oceans, leading to more water in the seas nearer the equator. This makes the Earth more oblate—or fatter—slowing the rotation of the planet and lengthening the day still further.

The planetary impact of humanity was also demonstrated recently by research that showed the redistribution of water had caused the Earth’s axis of rotation—the north and south poles—to move. Other work has revealed that humanity’s carbon emissions are shrinking the stratosphere.

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates,” said Prof Benedikt Soja of ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “Due to our carbon emissions, we have done this in just 100 or 200 years. Whereas the governing processes previously had been going on for billions of years, and that is striking.”

“We can see our impact as humans on the whole Earth system, not just locally, like the rise in temperature, but really fundamentally, altering how it moves in space and rotates.”

Human timekeeping is based on atomic clocks, which are extremely precise. However, the exact time of a day—one rotation of the Earth—varies due to lunar tides, climate impacts and some other factors, such as the slow rebound of the Earth’s crust after the retreat of ice sheets formed in the last ice age.

These differences have to be accounted for, said Soja: “All the data centers that run the internet, communications and financial transactions, they are based on precise timing. We also need a precise knowledge of time for navigation, and particularly for satellites and spacecraft.”

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), used observations and computer reconstructions to assess the impact of melting ice on the length of the day. The rate of slowing varied between 0.3 and 1.0 millisecond per century (ms/cy) between 1900 and 2000. But since 2000, as melting accelerated, the rate of change also accelerated to 1.3 ms/cy.

“This present-day rate is likely higher than at any time in the past few thousand years,” the researchers said. “It is projected to remain approximately at a level of 1.0 ms/cy for the next few decades, even if greenhouse gas emissions are severely curbed.” If emissions are not cut, the slowing rate will increase to 2.6 ms/cy by 2100, overtaking lunar tides as the single biggest contributor to long-term variations in the length of days, they said.

Santiago Belda of the University of Alicante in Spain, an expert who was not part of the research team, said: “This study is a great advance because it confirms that the worrying loss of ice that Greenland and Antarctica are suffering has a direct impact on day length, causing our days to lengthen. This variation in day length has critical implications not only for how we measure time, but also for GPS and other technologies that govern our modern lives.”