Fossil Fuels Made The Olympics 5 Degrees Hotter

So did deforestation and animal agriculture.

By Emily Atkin, Heated

I haven’t had time to analyze media coverage of the 2024 Olympic Games. So I’m not sure how many stories about Tuesday’s dangerous heat in Paris mentioned that the high temperatures were fueled by climate change.

But just in case you didn’t see, here’s an important stat: Fossil fuels, deforestation, and animal agriculture made outdoor temperatures at Tuesday’s Olympics about 5.2°F degrees hotter than they would have normally been.

The reason we know this is because of incredible recent advancements in attribution science, which uses observational data and statistical methods to figure out how likely and severe an extreme weather event would be today, compared to how it would have played out in a world un-warmed by human activities.

runners line up on a track at the olympics

Specifically, the 5.2°F number comes from a “super rapid analysis” published Wednesday by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international group dedicated to conducting and communicating attribution science. It found the heat wave that’s plagued France and other Mediterranean countries this July would have been anywhere from 4.5°F (2.5°C) to 5.9°F (3.3°C) cooler in a pre-climate-changed world. The average of that range is 5.2°F.

And the idea that fossil fuels, deforestation, and animal agriculture caused this 5.2°F increase comes from basic climate science. Approximately 75 percent of current anthropogenic CO2 emissions come from fossil fuels, and anywhere from 13 to 20 percent come from agriculture, forestry and land use (AFOLU), according to the IPCC. In the AFOLU category, 45 percent of emissions come from deforestation, and 41 percent of global deforestation comes from beef production.