Climate change is becoming more and more noticeable for us in Europe. Summers are already hotter and drier than ever before – and that’s not all, according to new forecasts.
Offenbach ‒ Low water, forest fires and blue-green algae plagues: The summer of 2022 offered some extreme weather events and broke some records. Noisy German Weather Service (DWD) it is considered the sunniest, sixth driest and one of the four warmest summers since records began in 1881. Uwe Kirsche, spokesman for the DWD, explains: “In times of climate change, we should have experienced a summer that will soon be typical.” What exactly does that mean , are now also showing new climate forecasts that should make the planet and us humans sweat quite a bit.
Climate in Europe: heat records in summer 2022
Not only in Germany was the summer, with an average of 19.2 degrees, around 2.9 degrees warmer than the value of the internationally valid reference period (1961 to 1990). Heat records were set across Europe. Great Britain reported temperatures of over 40 degrees for the first time, in Portugal the thermometer even climbed to an unbelievable 47 degrees. According to the EU Earth observation program Copernicus, summer 2022 was 0.4 degrees warmer across Europe than the previous record holder, summer 2021.
Further data from the DWD for Germany show: The five warmest years in Germany since 1881 occurred after the year 2000. The annual mean temperature has risen by 1.6 degrees in the last 140 years and the number of “hot days” (at least 30 degrees air temperature) has tripled to nine days a year since the 1950s. In view of these values, the whole of Europe must be prepared for ever hotter summers as long as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increases.
Rising temperatures: What does climate change mean for us humans?
As the German meteorologist Markus Donat told the mirror announced, Central Europe in particular has to prepare for the heat: “The Mediterranean region is a climate change hotspot”. For every degree that the entire world heats up, the temperature in southern Europe rises by 1.5 degrees. For example, regions in Spain and Portugal could suffer from 50 degrees and even more in the future.
The Mediterranean region is a climate change hotspot.
In general, according to the forecasts, there are always new heat records instead of cold records. And these new records surpass the old values by huge leaps instead of small steps each time. “Every tenth of a degree of warming counts,” said Donat, because each of them led to an increase in further heat extremes and also to a change in the weather in general.
The world’s hottest year is upon us until 2026
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change always uses different scenarios to predict the climate of the coming decades. The so-called “RCPs” (Representative Concentration Pathways) outline different socio-economic developments. Associated with this: different effects on the radiation budget of the earth, i.e. the development of future greenhouse gas emissions.
Depending on the scenario, the forecasts for the climate then turn out to be very different. Of the British weather service “Met Office” on the other hand, gives an easy-to-understand number: with a probability of 93 percent, one of the next four years will be the hottest in the world. (Yasina Hipp)
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