By Paul Homewood
This was the study I highlighted yesterday, which found that European summer warming in recent decades has been driven by reduced aerosol emissions:
Abstract
Compared to observations, climate models underestimate the recent increase of European summer temperatures, due to an underestimation of Quasi-stationary Rossby Wave (QSW) trends over Europe. This is partially due to unpredictable internal variability and partially due to an underestimation of the predictable signal in response to external forcings. The analysis of a large ensemble of historical simulations shows that forcing factors generate changes in QSW and European summer temperatures consistent with those from observations but with a lower magnitude, making most of the observed changes predictable by the models through a signal adjustment. The analysis of single forcing experiments shows a major contribution of aerosols starting from 1980, when the reduction of sulfate aerosol emissions over Europe is associated with a longitudinal temperature asymmetry, which alters the atmospheric circulation. These results further demonstrate the need to account for model errors to best estimate past and future changes in climate.
Plain Language Summary
In the last decades, summer temperatures over Europe increased more than over other regions, associated with a reduction of particle emissions. In particular, the reduction of sulfate emissions over Europe starting from 1980 is associated with changes in the atmospheric circulation and an additional warming over Europe. Climate models reproduce this behavior, but with a magnitude much smaller than that of observations. If the outputs of the models are corrected to compensate for this underestimation, the increase in European summer temperatures becomes largely predictable. Our results highlight the need to take model error into account to estimate past and future climate change.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2026GL122424
Three of the authors are from the Earth Sciences Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center. But D M Smith works at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter.
The paper was first published on 30th June and formally included in the GRL Issue 13 on 16th July. Yet weeks later, the Met Office still has not referred to it on its news website, blog or even its X Feed.
I find this astonishing, given their own role in the study and the significance of the paper’s findings.
The study, of course, undermines the Met Office’s theory that hot summers, such as the current one, are largely the result of man-made climate change, by which they mean caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that the Met Office claimed:
More than 2,700 people are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales. Of those, it’s estimated that 42% died as a result of the extra heat caused by human-induced warming.
Climate-fuelled heat: Daytime maximum temperatures across England and Wales are now roughly 3-4°C hotter than they would have been without human-induced climate change, raising the health risks associated with these heatwaves
You can take or leave the aerosol theory, but what this new research confirms is that the jet stream is the driver of hot summers here in the UK, not GHG emissions.
Perhaps now the Met Office will acknowledge their own research?
