Climate change is causing heatwaves to happen more often and with greater intensity
is increasing the number heatwaves in Europe faster than computer modelling has previously predicted, new research suggests. Temperatures in Europe have hit record highs this summer passing 46.0C (114.8F) in southern . The number of extreme heat days in Europe has tripled since 1950, with summers becoming hotter overall. The number of extreme cold days during the winter have more than than halved in some areas, with the later part of the year also warming over the decades. Scroll down for video Extreme heat is dangerous because it stresses the human body, potentially leading to heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Scientists knew climate change was warming Europe, but they mostly studied long-term changes in extreme temperatures. The new study looked at weather station data recorded between 1950 and 2018 and analysed the top one per cent of the hottest heat extremes and highest humidity extremes, and the top one per cent coldest days during that period. They found that extremely hot days have become hotter by an average of 2.30C (4.14F). Extremely cold days have warmed by 3C (5.4F) on average. 'We looked further at the hottest day or coldest night per year, so for each year we looked for the maximum/minimum value and how these changed over time,' said Ruth Lorenz, a climate scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and lead author of the study. 'Even at this regional scale over Europe, we can see that these trends are much larger than what we would expect from natural variability. That's really a signal from climate change.' Individual regions throughout Europe experienced drastically different temperature trends, which makes it difficult to compare the average European temperatures to specific stations' extremes, according to the authors. In Central Europe, the extremes warmed by 0.14C (0.25F) per decade more than the summer mean, equivalent to an almost 1C (1.8F) increase more than the average over the whole study period, according to Dr Lorenz. More than 90 per cent of the weather stations studied showed the climate was warming, a percentage too high to purely be from natural climate variability, according to the researchers. The results also showed that the region was warming faster than climate models projected. Some regions experienced higher extremes than expected and some had lower extremes that expected. 'In the Netherlands, Belgium, France, the model trends are about two times lower than the observed trends,' said Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, a climate analysist at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, Netherlands, who was not involved in the study. 'We're reaching new records faster than you'd expect.' European summers and winters will only grow hotter in the coming years as climate change accelerates, impacting cities and people unprepared for rising temperatures, the study authors claim 'Lots of people don't have air conditioning for instance and it makes this really important,' Dr Lorenz said. 'We expected results based on modelling studies but it's the first time we see it in what we've observed so far.' The full findings of the study were published in the AGU journal