The temperature in Europe in 2022 was not 2.3 °C higher than the average of the pre-industrial period (1850-1900). The Old Continent is warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, which is having “far-reaching repercussions on the socio-economic fabric and ecosystems of the region”. This is indicated by the report on the state of the climate in Europe in 2022, drawn up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Copernicus Service of the EU.
The Old Continent recorded the warmest summer on record in 2022, and several countries (Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland) experienced the warmest year since they have records The average annual temperature was between the second and fourth highest on record (about 0.79°C above the 1991-2020 average).
The report highlights how the increase in extreme weather phenomena (intense heat and droughts, among others) is having an increasing impact on the European energy system. “Other temperatures exacerbated severe and widespread drought conditions, fueled violent wildfires that left the second-largest area burned on record, and caused an excess of thousands of heat-related deaths.” , stated the Secretary General of the WMO, Petteri Taalas.
Recorded weather, hydrological and climate events caused 16,365 fatalities and directly affected 156,000 people. Unfortunately, “this cannot be considered an isolated event or a climate oddity”, since “our current knowledge of the climate system and its evolution indicates that these kinds of phenomena form a pattern that will make the cases extremes of thermal stress will be more frequent and more intense throughout the region”, says director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
About 67% of these events were related to floods and storms, which caused most of the damage. The heat waves were particularly severe in terms of mortality, since, according to the recorded data, they caused an excess of mortality, estimated at more than 16 000 people.
Precipitation was below average over much of the region in 2022; it was the fourth consecutive year of drought in the Iberian Peninsula, and the third in the mountainous regions of the Alps and the Pyrenees.
France recorded the period from January to September as the driest, a phenomenon widespread in the United Kingdom or Belgium, which had important consequences for agriculture and energy production. European glaciers lost about 880 km3 of ice between 1997 and 2022, with the Alps, the hardest hit, recording an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 metres.
The Greenland ice sheet lost 5,362 gigatons of ice between 1972 and 2021, contributing to a sea level rise of about 14.9 mm. And the surface warming rates of the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic and Black seas and the southern Arctic were more than three times higher than the global average.
However, for the first time in the EU, more electricity was generated with wind and solar energy than with gas, Taalas points out. Wind and solar energy produced 22.3% of electricity, more than gas (20%).
