Europe is the continent with the fastest warming pace – 19/06/2023 – Environment

Europe is the continent with the fastest warming rate due to climate change in the world. Its average temperature is already 2.3°C higher than in the pre-industrial era.

“Europe is the region of the world that is warming the fastest”, warned Professor Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the WMO (World Meteorological Organization), quoted in a report published by the UN and the European Copernicus program this Monday (19) .

The entire planet has seen warming of nearly 1.2°C due to greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Urals, the pace of warming is twice as fast.

The WMO had announced in November that Europe was warming at a rate of +0.5°C per decade, that is, twice as fast as the average for the rest of the five world meteorological regions.

In most of Europe, “high temperatures have exacerbated intense and violent droughts, fueled by raging forest fires, responsible for the second largest surface area burned on the continent to date,” said Taalas.

According to the WMO database, meteorological, hydrological and climate phenomena in Europe in 2022 directly affected 156,000 people and caused 16,365 deaths, almost exclusively due to heat waves.

Fourth consecutive year of drought

Economic losses, mainly related to floods and storms, were estimated at around US$ 2 billion in 2022 (R$ 10.4 billion, at the exchange rate at the time), far from the US$ 50 billion in 2021 (R$ 279 billion reais, also in the quotation for the period), when exceptional floods were recorded.

The thermometer went up and the rains were below normal in much of the continent.

“This is the fourth consecutive year of drought in the Iberian peninsula and the third in the mountainous regions of the Alps and the Pyrenees”, explains the report.

France suffered the worst drought on record since 1976 between January and September, and the UK had its driest period between January and August.

Alpine glaciers suffered “a record loss of mass in one year, due to little snow during the winter, a very hot summer and the arrival of dust from the Sahara”.

Since 1997, European glaciers have lost around 880 km³ of ice.

The average sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic was the warmest on record.

The year 2022 is “unfortunately not a unique case or a climate anomaly,” commented Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Observatory (C3S).

The year “was part of a trend that will make extreme heat stress episodes more frequent and intense,” it added.

In 2021, the most recent year with a complete data series, the concentration of the three main greenhouse gases (carbon, methane and nitrogen oxide) reached record levels. These emissions continued to rise in 2022, according to partial data.

The only promising data in this gloomy report comes from solar and wind power, which together, for the first time, produced more electricity (22.3%) than fossil fuel gas (20%) and coal (16%).