Europe experienced a year in 2022 that was 2.3 degrees warmer than the climate at the end of the 19th century, confirming that the continent is overheating twice as fast as the global average, leading to heat waves and exceptional droughts.
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“In 2022, Europe was around 2.3°C above the pre-industrial average (1850-1900) used as a reference for the Paris climate agreement,” said the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Copernicus network known on Monday in their annual review.
In November, the WMO announced that Europe has been warming at a rate of +0.5 degrees per decade since 1990, twice the average for the other five global meteorological regions.
2022 was the hottest year on record for Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
In the entire European meteorological region, 2022 was the second warmest year, or fourth if Greenland and parts further to the east are included.
But almost the entire region experienced temperatures of more than 0.5 degrees above normal (1991-2020).
Excessive Mortality
“Europe is the fastest warming region in the world,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the WMO.
Those “high temperatures have exacerbated intense and widespread droughts, fueled fierce wildfires responsible for the second largest burnt area on record, and claimed thousands of lives,” he said.
According to the Emergency Situations Database (EM-DAT), in 2022 in Europe, 156,000 people were directly affected by meteorological, hydrological and climatic hazards and caused 16,365 deaths, almost entirely due to heat waves.
Economic damage, mostly related to floods and storms, is estimated to total around $2 billion in 2022, a far cry from the $50 billion reported in 2021 following exceptional flooding.
As the thermometer rose, much of Europe saw below-average rainfall.
“This is the fourth consecutive dry year in the Iberian Peninsula and the third in the mountainous regions of the Alps and Pyrenees,” the report said.
France experienced its driest period since 1976 in January-September 2022, as did the UK in January-August, with “significant impacts on agriculture and energy production”.
Glaciers in the European Alps have “experienced a record mass loss in a single year, caused by very little snowfall in winter, a very hot summer and deposits of Saharan dust.” Since 1997, all European glaciers have lost around 880 km3 of ice.
Hope for renewable energy
Average surface temperatures in the North Atlantic were the highest on record, with each heatwave leading to species migrations and extinctions, and the disruption of entire marine ecosystems.
2022 is “unfortunately not an isolated case or a climatic curiosity,” commented Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus (C3S) climate observatory of the European Union.
The year “is part of a trend that will make episodes of extreme heat stress more frequent and more intense across the region.”
In 2021, the most recent year for which consolidated data was available, the concentrations of the three main greenhouse gases (carbon, methane and nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere reached their highest levels, the two organizations recall. And in 2022, data from multiple sites shows that emissions of all three gases have continued to rise.
A rare ray of hope from the report: last year, for the first time in Europe, solar and wind energy together produced more electricity (22.3%) than gas of fossil origin (20%) and coal (16%).