The temperature of Europe was in the year 2022 approximately 2.3 °C higher than the average of the pre-industrial period (1850-1900). The old continent is warming at twice the rate of the world average since the 1980s, which is having “far-reaching repercussions on the region’s socioeconomic fabric and ecosystems.”
This is indicated by the report on the State of the Climate in Europe in 2022, prepared jointly by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union, published this Monday, June 19. The document indicates that climate change is taking a significant human, economic and environmental toll on Europe.
The old continent recorded the warmest summer in history in 2022, confirms this new summary. In addition, several countries, including Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, experienced the warmest year in their history.
The 2022 average annual temperature in Europe was between the second and fourth highest on record, with an anomaly of about 0.79 °C above the average for the period 1991-2020 (level used as reference).
The highly energy-focused report highlights how increasing extreme weather events, including intense heat, heavy rainfall and drought, are increasingly impacting supply, demand and infrastructure in the energy system European.
“High temperatures exacerbated severe and widespread dry conditions, fueled violent wildfires that left the second largest area burned on record, and caused thousands of excess heat-related deaths,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. .
The meteorological, hydrological and climatic risks registered in Europe in 2022 caused 16,365 fatalities and directly affected 156,000 people, according to the databases managed by these two organizations.
The unprecedented heat stress suffered by Europeans in 2022 “was one of the main drivers of excess weather-related deaths in Europe,” says Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Unfortunately, adds Buontempo, “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 types of phenomena are part of a pattern that will make extreme cases of thermal stress are more frequent and more intense throughout the region”-
About 67% of those events were related to floods and storms, which caused most of the total economic damage, which was around $2 billion.
Much more serious, in terms of mortality, were the heat waves, which would have caused an excess of more than 16,000 deaths, according to the joint report. The unprecedented heat stress experienced by Europeans in 2022 was one of the main drivers of excess weather-related deaths in Europe, he notes.
“Unfortunately, this cannot be considered an isolated event or a climate oddity. Our current knowledge of the climate system and its evolution tells us that these types of events are part of a pattern that will make extreme cases of heat stress more frequent and more intense throughout the region,” said Carlo Buontempo, Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The document envisions that, despite this scenario, “there is a ray of hope for the future”: last year renewable energies generated more electricity for the first time than polluting fossil fuels. Wind and solar energy produced 22.3% of the electricity in the European Union (EU) in 2022, more than fossil fuels (20%).
“For the first time, more electricity was generated in the EU with wind and solar power than with fossil fuels. In order to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, it is crucial to increase the use of renewable energy and low-carbon energy sources,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
The EU has committed to increasing renewable energy production to reach at least 42.5% of total consumption by 2030, almost double that of 2019.
The report launches other key messages that are summarized below.
Rainfall 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 driest January-September period, and the United Kingdom and Uccle (Belgium) experienced the driest January-August period since 1976, with major consequences for agriculture and energy production. Spain’s water reserves decreased to 41.9% of their total capacity on July 26, with an even lower percentage in some basins.
Glaciers in Europe lost an ice volume of about 880 km3 between 1997 and 2022. The Alps were the most affected, with an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 metres. In 2022, glaciers in the European Alps experienced a new record mass loss in a single year, caused by very low winter snowfall amounts, a very hot summer, and accumulation of Saharan dust.
The Greenland ice sheet lost an estimated 5,362 gigatons of ice between 1972 and 2021, contributing about 14.9 mm to global mean sea level rise. And according to scientific assessments, it continued to lose mass throughout 2022.
Mean sea surface temperatures across the entire North Atlantic area were the warmest ever recorded and large portions of the region’s seas were affected by strong or even severe extreme marine heat waves.
Rates of warming of the ocean surface, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic and Black seas, and the southern Arctic, were more than three times the global average.
Marine heat waves cause the migration of species and mass extinctions, the arrival of invasive species and the alteration of ecosystems and biodiversity.
