Emissions from fossil fuel and cement producers could be directly responsible for making an average heatwave "50 per cent more intense" since the pre-industrial era, a study has suggested.
The research, published in Nature, also indicates that the emissions from a single carbon major emitter could have contributed to as many as "16 to 53 heatwaves" -- events that would have been "virtually impossible" in a world without global warming.
Researchers from Europe, including experts at ETH Zurich, analysed 213 heatwaves recorded between 2000 and 2023 in the international 'Emergency Events Database', including the 2022 heatwave in India.
The team investigated how emissions from the 180 largest carbon majors -- fossil fuel companies like Saudi Aramco, Russia's Gazprom, Chevron, and coal-reliant countries such as China and India -- contributed to increasing the likelihood of these heatwaves.
"The emissions of the carbon majors contribute to half the increase in heatwave intensity since 1850-1900," they wrote.
Each of the 180 carbon major "substantially contributed" towards climate change that "made 213 historical heatwaves reported over 2000–2023 more likely and more intense", the researchers said.
The researchers described their analysis as an 'attribution study' -- a method which helps determine how much climate change has influenced specific events like heatwaves or extreme rainfall.
The evidence from attribution studies have become increasingly important in recent years hold specific entities accountable for the damages caused by their contributions to climate change.
However, the researchers pointed out that it is still rare for studies to measure the contributions of specific human groups or entities to extreme weather events.
"We, therefore, establish that the influence of climate change on heatwaves has increased, and that all carbon majors, even the smaller ones, contributed substantially to the occurrence of heatwaves," the authors wrote.
Further, human-caused climate change made a typical heatwave "20 times" more likely during 2000-2009, and "about 200 times" more likely during 2010-2019, they said.
Overall, a quarter of the events analysed were found to be "virtually impossible without climate change", it added.
"Depending on the carbon major, their individual contribution is high enough to enable the occurrence of 16-53 heatwaves that would have been virtually impossible in a pre-industrial climate," they said.
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