Greenhouse gas emissions released over the past decade – i.e. since the 2015 Paris Agreement was signed – have made Europe’s heat waves more intense, according to a new study by Stanford University.
In conducting their study, which was published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers trained a generative AI model to predict how extreme heat waves in Europe would unfold under different emissions levels.
As the data showed, there was a more-than-99% probability that human-caused emissions over the past decade have ‘intensified’ recent heat waves across Europe.
‘Strong evidence’
“We found strong evidence that if Europe’s heat wave in the summer of 2025 had occurred without the emissions since 2015, it very likely would have been cooler,” commented lead author Jared Trok, a PhD student in Earth system science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “That result is not unique to the 2025 heat wave, but also true for Europe’s hottest week in every individual year since at least 2021.”
According to the researchers, close to one-fifth of all carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion have been released during the decade since the Paris Agreement was adopted.
Paris Agreement
Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries pledged to pursue efforts to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That threshold is fast approaching, meaning that stabilising rising temperatures will require reducing emissions to net zero – a scenario that could take decades to achieve.
“Even in the most optimistic timelines for reducing emissions, there will still be more emissions in the future than there have been in the last decade since the Paris Agreement,” added co-author Noah Diffenbaugh, the William Wrigley professor and Kimmelman Family senior fellow in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “This study highlights that we can expect the kinds of extreme heat waves we’ve been experiencing recently to intensify even more in the coming years.”
The researchers added that the findings demonstrate the importance of adaptation, with governments and citizens alike needing to prepare for increasingly intense extreme weather alongside efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Read more here.
