;Resize=(1200,627)&hash=e2a5aed87aa4b90b675957c6e708044c03b1fa515cb017cbe84f0d2ae321f548 "Dramatic heat record in Europe, but there is also good news")
European climate report 2022: Dramatic heat record in Europe, but there is also good news
Thursday, 04/20/2023, 10:52
Whether it’s heat, drought or fires: the climate in Europe broke several negative records in 2022. But the new “European Climate Report” also shows that climate protection has already paid off.
Average temperatures in Europe and other indicators of climate change reached new highs last year. This emerges from the annual report of the European climate monitoring service Copernicus, which was published on Thursday in Bonn.
Accordingly, the continent experienced the hottest summer since weather records began and the second warmest year overall. Records were also registered for solar radiation, glacier retreat in the Alps and the number of days with extreme heat in southern European countries. At the same time, forest fires released more CO2 than at any time in 15 years.
A cube five times the height of the Eiffel Tower
According to the scientists, the summer was 1.4 degrees warmer than the average for the ten years from 1991 to 2020. The average annual temperature was 0.9 degrees above the average for this period. According to the average of the last five years, the climate in Europe is now about 2.2 degrees warmer than in the pre-industrial period (1850-1900). Overall, according to the study, temperatures in Europe are rising twice as fast as the global average and faster than on any other continent.
More glacier ice melted than ever before in the European Alps last year. The glaciers of the Alps lost more than five cubic kilometers of ice. If you were to press this mass of ice into a cube, the edges of the cube would be around five and a half times as high as the Eiffel Tower.
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“The climate that awaits us will be very, very different”
Carlo Buontempo, director responsible for climate change at Copernicus, spoke of “alarming changes”; he also referred to heat waves in the Mediterranean and temperature records in Greece. “The climate that awaits us will be very, very different than the climate we grew up in,” Buontempo said. It is all the more important to collect data and knowledge about it and to draw the right conclusions.
The experts noted the widespread drought in Europe as particularly noticeable. Significantly less precipitation fell in winter 2021-2022 and in spring and summer 2022; in May it rained less than ever before in this month. Together with heat waves, this had an impact on agriculture, river navigation and the energy industry, among others.
The solar miracle
In addition, solar radiation in Europe was more intense than at any other time in the past 40 years. The positive result: in many parts of the continent there was above-average potential for the production of solar power. Experts assume that this trend will continue. In the case of wind power, the production as a whole was average – in Eastern and Southeastern Europe there was an above-average amount of wind, in Northern, Central and Western Europe the amount was below average. At the end, the report emphasized the need to expand renewable energies.
According to the report, the region around the North Pole also experienced drastic changes. The Arctic is therefore warming faster than the rest of the globe. In Greenland, temperatures in September were 8 degrees higher than usual, a new record; this and three different heat waves caused an unprecedented melting of the ice sheet.
flr/KNA/dpa