Extreme heat and drought typical of an end-of-century climate could occur over Europe soon and repeatedly

Abstract

Extreme heat and drought typical of an end-of-century climate could soon occur over Europe, and repeatedly. Despite the European climate being potentially prone to multi-year successive extremes due to the influence of the North Atlantic variability, it remains unclear how the likelihood of successive extremes changes under warming, how early they could reach end-of-century levels, and how this is affected by internal climate variability. Using the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble, we find that even under moderate warming, end-of-century heat and drought levels virtually impossible 20 years ago reach 1-in-10 likelihoods as early as the 2030s. By 2050–2074, two successive years of single or compound end-of-century extremes, unprecedented to date, exceed 1-in-10 likelihoods; while Europe-wide 5-year megadroughts become plausible. Whole decades of end-of-century heat stress could start by 2040, by 2020 for drought, and with a warm North Atlantic, end-of-century decades starting as early as 2030 become twice as likely.

Recent tendencies of extreme heat events in Italy

“…From 2000, only four years show an overall negative mean temperature anomaly, with respect to the 1991-2020 climatological reference (2023). The next decades are finally not foreseen to see a change in this worrisome trend, since Europe could experience end-of-century climate scenarios for heat and drought much sooner than expected Suarez-Gutierrez et al (2023). Strongly related to high temperatures, heat waves are among the most dangerous of natural hazards, having high impact on society in terms of heat-related deaths.…”

Reduced plasticity and variance in physiological rates of ectotherm populations under climate change

“…Climate change is expected to result in warmer but also more variable thermal environments globally (Easterling et al 2000;Ummenhofer & Meehl 2017;Suarez-Gutierrez et al 2023). Greater thermal variability in the past should result in strong selection pressures that lead to genetic adaptation and/or the evolution of adaptive phenotypic plasticity -both of which are considered important for population resilience to contemporary human-induced climate change (Chevin et al 2010;Merila & Hendry 2014;Chevin & Lande 2015;Seebacher et al 2015Seebacher et al , 2023Nunney 2016;Chevin & Hoffmann 2017;Cooke et al 2021).…”