The old continent is overheating. The climate in Europe has warmed by 2.3 degrees compared to the pre-industrial era (1850-1900), with a rate twice as fast as the world average since the 1980s, announced on Monday the UN and the European Copernicus program.
While the whole planet has warmed by almost 1.2 degrees due to greenhouse gas emissions, “Europe is the fastest warming region in the world”, recalled the Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), quoted in the report.
Excess mortality and climatic disasters
In November, the WMO announced that Europe had warmed at a rate of +0.5 degrees per decade, twice as fast as the average for the other five global weather regions. In much of Europe, “high temperatures have exacerbated intense and widespread droughts, fueled violent forest fires, responsible for the second largest area burned ever measured on the continent, and caused excess deaths by the thousands due to heat waves,” said Petteri Taalas.
According to the Emergency Situations Database (EM-DAT), meteorological, hydrological and climatic hazards in Europe in 2022 directly affected 156,000 people and caused 16,365 deaths, almost exclusively due to heat waves. Since 1980, meteorological disasters (heat waves, floods, etc.) have caused the death of 195,000 people, the European Environment Agency (EEA) announced on Wednesday.
No “climate oddity”
The economic damage, mostly linked to floods and storms, is estimated in total at around two billion dollars for the year 2022, far from the 50 billion for the year 2021 after exceptional floods. The year 2022 is “unfortunately not a unique case or a climate oddity”, commented Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus (C3S) climate change observatory.
It “is part of a trend that will make extreme episodes of heat stress more frequent and more intense throughout the region”. A rare glimmer of hope from the report: last year in Europe, renewable energies produced more electricity (22.3%) than fossil fuels (20%) for the first time.