The world is about to endure a years-long heatwave, starting this summer, a team of scientists in Europe are predicting.
The result could mean an unusually long string of beach days in New Zealand, but it could also be a sign of more floods, droughts and wildfires over the next several years, similar to the ones currently being seen in the Northern Hemisphere.
Victoria University’s James Renwick talked about the study on TVNZ1’s Breakfast.
The prediction is the result of a new statistical model devised by researchers in the UK, Holland and France that uses weather trends dating back more than 100 years to provide more reliable predictions about future patterns.
"It looks pretty good," Victoria University of Wellington professor and climate scientist James Renwick said today of the model's reliability.
"The overall warming trend with global warming, the increase in greenhouse gasses, that's pretty well understood," he told TVNZ1's Breakfast. "But the little ups and downs from one year to the next are pretty hard to get a handle on.
"But over the last 20 years this model they've come up with looks like it's done a pretty good job."
The findings were published this week in the scholarly journal Nature.
The predicted rise in global temperatures would be independent of man-made global warming trends, Mr Renwick said.
"We had the warmest year on record in 2016, 2017 was almost as warm, this year is going to be one of the warmest on record," he said.
But those temperatures could look "pretty average" or even "quite cold" by mid-century, long after the temporary heatwave has subsided, if "we keep putting greenhouse gasses into the air", he said.
SHARE ME