Washington: The way climate change and global warming are influencing the world, reports of hotter summers in the years to come doesn't exactly come as a surprise.
If the findings of a study are to be believed, people across the world are in for summers that will be the hottest ever in history, in the next 50 years.
The study conducted by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, says that the failure to reduce greenhouse gases and carbon emissions will result in an 80 percent chance that summers between 2061 and 2081 will be warmer than the hottest on record.
However, a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions drops the probability down to 41 percent.
If this happens, then the resultant impact due to the rising temperatures will also affect our health, damage crops and deepen droughts.
"Extremely hot summers always pose a challenge to society," said lead author of the study Flavio Lehner, scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
To conduct the study, the research team used two existing sets of model simulations to investigate what future summers might look like.
They created both by running the NCAR-based Community Earth System Model 15 times, with one simulation assuming that greenhouse gas emissions remain unabated and the other assuming that society reduces emissions.
By using simulations created by running the same model multiple times, with only tiny differences in the initial starting conditions, the scientists could examine the range of expected summertime temperatures for future "business-as-usual" and reduced-emissions scenarios.
The results showed that between 2061 and 2080, summers in large parts of North and South America, central Europe, Asia, and Africa have a greater than 90 per cent chance of being warmer than any summer in the historic record if emissions continue unabated.
That means virtually every summer would be as warm as the hottest to date.
The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Climatic Change.
(With IANS inputs)
