The report notes that Europe is the fastest warming continent. Heatwaves will kill 16,000 people in Europe in 2022. Europe is the continent with the fastest warming due to climate change in the world and its average temperature is already 2.3°C higher than it was in the pre-industrial era (1850 -1900), noted the joint report issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and scientists from the European Copernicus Program issued on Monday (19/06). “Europe is the region of the world where temperatures are rising the fastest,” warned Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the Organization (WMO). The entire planet has experienced a warming of nearly 1.2 degrees Celsius due to greenhouse gas emissions, which means that from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Ural Mountains, the pace of warming is twice as fast. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) announced in November that Europe is warming at a rate of +0.5°C per decade, more than twice as fast as the average in the rest of the five global meteorological regions. “Soaring temperatures across most of Europe have exacerbated severe and violent droughts, fueled by raging forest fires, which are responsible for the second-largest surface area burned on the continent so far,” Taalas said. Extreme heat killed 16,000 people in 2022 According to the database of the World Meteorological Organization, meteorological, hydrological and climatological phenomena in Europe in 2022 directly affected 156,000 people and caused 16,365 deaths, almost exclusively due to heat waves, which focused at 99.6% of deaths. Europe recorded the hottest summer in its history in 2022, and for countries such as Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, this year was the hottest in its history. Floods and storms accounted for 67% of the events and were responsible for most of the total economic damage billed at $2.13 billion. d said. Carlo Bontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service. “Our current understanding of the climate system and its evolution tells us that these types of events are part of a pattern that will make extreme heat stresses more frequent and intense across the region,” he said. Scientists have warned that temperatures are rising to record levels around the world as the excessive warming caused by climate change mixes with the trend caused by El Niño. Scientists said the reason Europe is warming faster than other continents has to do with the fact that most of the continent is located in the Arctic and North Pole – the fastest warming region of the Earth – as well as changes in climate feedback. General Extreme Events In the past year, intense and intense marine heat waves were reported in parts of the Mediterranean, Baltic and Black Seas, while glacier melt was the highest on record. “This is the fourth consecutive year of drought in the Iberian Peninsula and the third in the mountainous regions of the Alps and Pyrenees,” the report states. France experienced its worst drought on record since 1976 between January and September, and the United Kingdom experienced a dry spell between January and August. Alpine glaciers suffered a “record loss of mass in one year, due to a lack of snow during the winter, a very hot summer and the arrival of dust from the Sahara”. Since 1997, European glaciers have lost about 880 km3 of ice. Average sea surface temperatures across the entire North Atlantic region were the warmest on record, and large parts of the region’s seas were affected by strong or “extremely intense” marine heat waves. But in what the survey called a hopeful sign, renewable energy made up more electricity in the EU (22.3%) than polluting fossil gas (20%) for the first time last year. jps (AFP, Reuters, EFE)
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