Global emissions since the Paris agreement have intensified Europe's recent heatwaves

This paper examines whether global greenhouse gas emissions released since the 2015 Paris Agreement can be linked to changes in Europe's recent heat extremes. The authors developed an event-specific attribution approach using a generative machine-learning diffusion model trained on climate model simulations. The model predicts spatially explicit changes in daily surface temperature at different levels of cumulative emissions and was applied to observed European heat events using ERA5 reanalysis data and outputs from 10 CMIP6 global climate models.

The paper finds strong evidence (>95% probability) that anthropogenic emissions released since 2015 have increased the intensity of Europe's summer temperature extremes since 2021. It also finds >95% probability that post-2015 emissions increased the intensity of the hottest week of the year and the number of extreme heat days from 2022 to 2025. This work is an important step toward understanding the influence of subsets of historical emissions on individual extreme weather events and their impacts.