To the surprise of no one –

The deadly, protracted heat waves that have scorched parts of North America and Europe this month would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, according to a new study published Tuesday.

The analysis by the World Weather Attribution network, a coalition of scientists that conducts rapid analyses to determine how the warming atmosphere influences extreme weather events, examined weather data and computer model simulations to compare the climate as it is today, having experienced warming of about 1.2 Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s, with the climate of the past.

…

“They are not rare in today’s climate,” Friederike Otto, co-leader of the group and a climate scientist at Imperial College London, said in an interview. “What surprises me is that people are so surprised. It is exactly what we expected to see.”

I’m surprised that she’s surprised that we’re surprised. People are good at denial when it comes to the future, and especially good at it when being good at it allows us to go right on breaking everything.

At least scientifically, Otto said, the findings support a growing consensus among researchers: The warmer the world gets, the more likely regions are to experience crippling heat waves, stronger storms and other climate-fueled disasters.

The warmer the world gets, the warmer the world will get. I think I grasp the idea now.

Ultimately, they found that the heat waves that baked the Southwest and southern Europe would have almost no chance of happening in a world without climate change. The Chinese heat wave was made about 50 times more likely given global warming, the study found, while the European and North American heat waves were at least 1,000 times more likely.

Ok ok ok. We can’t pretend it was the fault of something else. We can’t pretend we didn’t do this to ourselves (and everything else on the planet).

Also it’s only going to get worse.

Otto is adamant that the startling heat waves of recent weeks, while no longer rare on a warming planet, do not represent a new reality. “We don’t know what the new normal is until we stop burning fossil fuels. We are not in a stable climate,” she said.

Until the trajectory of human emissions falls sharply, temperature records will continue to fall. Heat waves will grow more fierce and more prolific, offering only a glimpse of potentially hotter stretches ahead. “This is not what extremes in the future will look like,” Otto said. “This could be even a cold year in the summers to come. This is not what we need to get used to. We need to get used to this, and worse.”

But vast numbers of people will not get used to it but be killed by it.