New Scientist - USA (2021-07-17)

(Antfer) #1
17 July 2021 | New Scientist | 11

RICHARD BRANSON has finally
travelled to the edge of space
aboard his Virgin Galactic space
plane. The billionaire has narrowly
become the first person to fly on
a spacecraft of their own making,
beating Blue Origin founder
Jeff Bezos by a matter of days.
On 11 July, the VSS Unity
launched from New Mexico,
taking Branson, two pilots and three
other passengers on a 90-minute
suborbital flight to an altitude of
85 kilometres. This passed the
US government’s definition of the
boundary of space. The passengers,
including Branson, were presented
with commercial astronaut wings
upon landing by Canadian former
astronaut Chris Hadfield.
The internationally held
definition of space – the Kármán
line – is 100 kilometres above
Earth, and Bezos will attempt
to cross it in his New Shepard
spacecraft on 20 July.  ❚

Space flight

THE recent deadly and record-
breaking heatwave in North
America would have been
“virtually impossible” without
climate change, according
to scientists who say they are
worried about the prospect
of similar events occurring
around the world.
An international team has
found that the heatwave, which
may have killed hundreds of
people and saw Canada’s
temperature record being broken
by nearly 5°C in the village of
Lytton, was made at least 150 times
more likely by global warming.
The temperature highs were 2°C
hotter than they would have been
without the human activity that

has warmed Earth, say the
researchers at the World
Weather Attribution project.
“It’s an extraordinary event,”
says team member Geert Jan
van Oldenborgh at the Royal
Netherlands Meteorological
Institute. “A lot of people are
very worried about this event.
Could this also happen here
in the Netherlands, France,
in other places, suddenly
having a 5°C jump?”
Van Oldenborgh and his
colleagues used an approach
known as extreme event
attribution, whittling down
35 computer models to 21 that
were best able to reproduce
past weather observations in

an area incorporating parts of
British Columbia, Oregon and
Washington. The models were
then used to estimate average
maximum daily temperatures
in the area studied, with and
without climate change.
The near-50°C temperatures
recorded in Canada don’t appear
in statistical models. That forced
the team to artificially include the
event in their models, making
assumptions on the rarity of such
a heatwave, which they estimated
as a roughly 1 in 1000 years event.

The models then showed the event
was 150 times more probable in
a world with climate change.
Up to last year, such heat in
the region was impossible, says
van Oldenborgh. “We are much
less certain about how the
climate affects heatwaves
than we were two weeks ago.”
The heatwave could just have
been bad luck aggravated by
climate change or due to other
interactions in the climate, such
as the severe drought in the south
of the area studied, says the team.
The report is on the World
Weather Attribution website, but
hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed due
to the rapid nature of the work. ❚

Environment

Climate change made heatwave more likely


Jacob Aron and Leah Crane

Flying to the edge of space


Richard Branson launched on his Virgin Galactic craft


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Adam Vaughan

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“ Could this also happen in
the Netherlands, France
or in other places, suddenly
having a 5°C jump?”
Free download pdf