In recent years, a new type of study that determines how much more likely a given recent natural disaster was due to climate change has become increasingly common. But while these extreme event attribution studies, as they’re called, help to establish the general cause, they don’t point any fingers. New research recently published in the journal Nature does, however: the authors of a study show how the emissions of companies and countries alike have led to the dramatic rise in both frequency and intensity of heatwaves since the year 2000.
The study looked at 213 heatwaves around the world that occurred between 2000 and 2023, including the 2003 heatwave in Europe and the 2021 heat dome in the Pacific Northwest. “Overall,” according to the study, “one-quarter of these events were virtually impossible without climate change.” Furthermore, major emitters “contributed to about half of the increase in intensity of heatwaves since preindustrial times, and that this contribution is rising,” according to the study.
While extreme heat has struck in places all across the country and all around the globe in recent years, there are certain communities within the United States that research shows are most susceptible to the dangers of increasingly hot heatwaves.
Predominantly Black communities face two to three times as many days of extreme heat in the course of a year compared to areas with fewer Black people. The risk of dying from extreme heat is higher for Black Americans, too. If these carbon emitters are pushing both the intensity and likelihood of heatwaves, they’re putting Black people disproportionately at risk.
To tie a given heatwave to a major emitter, “we assign to each carbon major the emissions associated with the full value chain of their products,” the researchers write, “including all emissions in line with established accounting and reporting standards.” By comparing the divvied-up emissions to preindustrial levels, they can then see specifically who is responsible for which increases — and thereby the role that each individual emitter has in contributing to each specific heatwave.
The emissions of 180 “carbon majors,” as the study calls major emitters in both the fossil fuel industry and highly carbon-intensive cement producers, too, were analyzed. The top 14 out of that group represent 30 percent of “total cumulative anthropogenic CO2 emissions,” an amount that’s nearly equivalent to all of the rest of the 180. The top emitters are “the former Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China for coal, Saudi Aramco, Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, BP, Shell, India for coal, Pemex, CHN Energy, People’s Republic of China for cement.”
The authors of the study make no qualms about it: this is science designed to help specifically and effectively lay blame. “Although this work aims at filling in scientific gaps,” they write, “the results also fill in evidentiary gaps.”
Climate organizations are taking note: “We can now point to specific heatwaves and say, ‘Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this,” Cassidy DiPaola from the organization Make Polluters Pay, told the Guardian. “When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, we’re talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms.”
