Half of All Summers Will Soon Be Boiling Hot for Hundreds of Millions of People

A new study finds climate change has caused a 60-fold increase in the likelihood of extreme temperatures in eastern China since the early 1950s.

Bathers endure China's 2013 heat wave in Suining, China.Imaginechina/AP


Last year was an absolute scorcher in China. In the eastern part of the country, more than a half-billion people sweltered through 31 days with daily maximum temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit or more, a historical record. The heat wave killed dozens of people. Nightmare-inducing crowds swamped public pools and beaches. NASA reported that Shanghai broke its all-time temperature record three times in as many weeks. The blistering heat was accompanied by a drought that afflicted the country’s food bowl, the Yangtze River basin, that cost China around $9.6 billion. The Associated Press reported at the time that “folks are grilling shrimp on manhole covers, eggs are hatching without incubators and a highway billboard has mysteriously caught fire by itself.”

Now the verdict is in: China better get used to it. New research released Sunday reveals that 2013 was not just some statistical blip—and man-made climate change is likely the main culprit. In just two decades, 50 percent of summers are likely to be hotter than the one Chinese people suffered through in 2013, according to the study. That means extreme summers like last year’s, which normally only happen once every 270 years, could happen every other year.

The research was conducted by the China Meteorological Administration, the Canadian government, and a researcher from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, and is featured in the latest edition of the science journal Nature Climate Change. The team analyzed historical climate data in eastern China, and found that man-made climate change has caused a 60-fold increase in the likelihood of extreme temperatures since the early 1950s, when reliable national records began. Similarly hot summers are becoming increasingly likely, they found. Heat waves are also starting earlier and ending later. The five hottest summers in China since records began all happened since 2000, according to the report.

“Human influence has produced a very large increase in the probability of clustering of extremely hot summers in the twenty-first century and of long-lasting severe heat waves such as that of 2013,” the researchers write. “The increase in summer heat, combined with the region’s rising population and wealth, would produce higher risks for human health, agricultural systems and energy production and distribution systems if sufficient adaptation measures are not in place.”

The link established by the report’s authors to man-made climate change adds yet another worry for China’s leaders, who are already battling an ongoing air pollution crisis that is currently blanketing the country’s north in extreme smog. China already has an alarming climate rap sheet: It is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases and the world’s top coal producer and consumer; some 70 percent of its energy supply comes from coal. As Chinese leaders throw every new technology—including fracking—at breaking its decades-long coal addiction, China promised world leaders at UN climate talks that it would peak its emissions “as early as possible”—the first time a high-ranking Chinese government official has mentioned such a target. China has also recently promised to start a nationwide cap-and-trade program to put a price on its carbon emissions.

Tourists in Beijing walk through thick smog on October 9; local authorities raised the smog alert to orange, the second-highest level. Imaginechina/AP

The report is the latest in a string of new research linking last year’s heat waves around the world—in Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and Europe—to climate change with an ever-increasing amount of scientific certainty.

Martin P. Hoerling, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who reviewed the study for me during an interview, said the Chinese results are useful in understanding why heat waves are happening more often around the globe. “We can generalize some of the heat wave experiences in China from these authors to other areas.”

Hoerling, who called Sunday’s Chinese study “solid” and “entirely consistent” with previous findings, edited a supplement to last month’s Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that summarized results from 20 separate research groups analyzing 16 different events in 2013. They found that while the climate change connection to events like droughts and storms remained unclear, scientifically, “human-caused climate change greatly increased the risk for the extreme heat waves.” The combined research shows that long heat waves are as much as 10 times more likely due to human-induced climate change.

Hoerling said that the authors of this latest Chinese study may even be taking a slightly conservative approach to “some of the more severe consequences that ongoing warming would have if you pushed this out a little bit into the second half of the 21st century.” 

The 2013 heat wave in China, he said, would be a “cold summer for those living in the latter half of the 21st century in this area if we continue on our pathway of emissions.”

Environment Canada, a government department, declined to make their lead researcher for the study, Zhang Xuebin, available for interview, and did not respond to written questions—a practice that appears consistent with widely reported policies that bar government researchers, including climate scientists, from discussing their work with journalists. A survey last year of 4000 Canadian researchers revealed widespread “muzzling” of federal scientists.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate