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Title: Scientists Link Hundreds of Severe Heat Waves To Fossil Fuel
Producers' Pollution

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/11/2242...

A new study published in Nature links more than 200 severe heat waves
directly to greenhouse gas pollution from major fossil fuel producers like
ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. Researchers found that up to a quarter of these
heat waves would have been virtually impossible without emissions from oil,
coal, and cement companies. NPR reports: The new study, published Wednesday
in the journal Nature, found that 213 heat waves were substantially more
likely and intense because of the activity of major fossil fuel producers,
also called carbon majors. They include oil, coal and cement companies, as
well as some countries. The scientists found as much as a quarter of the heat
waves would be "virtually impossible" without the climate pollution from
major fossil fuel producers. Some individual fossil fuel companies, such as
ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, had emissions high enough to cause some of the
more extreme heat waves, the research found. For the new study, the
scientists looked at something called the disaster database, a global list of
disasters maintained by university researchers, to identify heat waves "with
significant casualties, economic losses and calls for international
assistance. The scientists then used historical reconstructions and
statistical models to see how human-caused global warming made each heat wave
more likely and more intense. Then, to examine the link to major fossil fuel
producers, the researchers relied on the Carbon Majors Database to understand
the emissions of major oil, gas, coal and cement producers. "We ran a climate
model to reconstruct the historical period, and then we ran it again but
without the emissions of a specific carbon major, thus deducing its
contribution to global warming," Yann Quilcaille, climate scientist at ETH
Zurich and lead author of the study, says in an email. While some of the
contributions to heat waves came from larger well-known fossil fuel
companies, the study found that some smaller, lesser-known fossil fuel
companies are producing enough greenhouse gas emissions to cause heat waves
too, Quilcaille says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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