Heat waves, fires, drought… The summer of 2022 was the hottest ever recorded in Europe, confirmed this Thursday, April 20 the European Copernicus program in a report. Temperatures were about 1.4°C above average, and 0.3 to 0.4°C above those of the already abnormally hot summer of 2021.
The trend is expected to continue in the coming years. In Europe, Effis, the information system on forest fires, already predicts a summer of 2023 up to 2°C above normal. This rise in temperature will lead to more droughts and wildfires.
And summer isn’t the only season when temperatures are on the rise. Overall, the past eight years have been the warmest on record since records began in 1950, the report said. “Some years will be warmer and some will be cooler,” conceded Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). “But the odds of having warmer years are increasing.”
And for good reason: the study highlights an accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as CO2 and methane (CH4), whose concentration reached a record level last year. These are “alarming” climate changes, noted Carlo Buontempo, director of C3S. The disruption is being “intensified”.
“Mandatory” measures
Its effects are all the more visible in Europe, where the temperature is rising twice as fast as the global average. According to Copernicus, the continent has warmed by 2.2°C since the pre-industrial era (1850 – 1900), compared to 1.2°C for the planet. This is well above the predictions of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which called for a rise of 1.5°C.
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is imperative to mitigate the worst effects of climate change,” insisted Samantha Burgess. The IPCC, the climate experts mandated by the United Nations, recently called for ambitious measures to be taken in the face of global warming. According to its summary report published in March, it will reach 1.5°C for the planet by the years 2030-2035.
In response, the G7 countries (United States, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy and Canada) pledged this April to “accelerate” their exit from fossil fuels in all sectors, but without set a new deadline. They also aimed to reduce their additional plastic pollution to zero by 2040. Announcements that lack ambition, according to environmental NGOs.