AFP
An endless summer? Many European countries such as France, Germany, Poland and Switzerland experienced the hottest September on record, as did many other regions of the world.
In these countries, the average temperature in September was more than 3 °C above normal, according to the respective weather services. In Germany the difference was 3.9°C.
Temperatures were also unusually high for this time of year in the Iberian Peninsula and this Friday (29) they exceeded 35°C in some cities in the south of Spain.
This data complements data from the entire planet, which tends to exceed the annual temperature record in 2023.
After the hottest JuneAugust quarter on record, the world is reeling from the effects of climate change caused by human activity compounded in recent months by the return of the El Niño phenomenon, which warms the waters of the Pacific and usually increases warming leads to an increase in global temperatures.
The winter was particularly warm in the Southern Cone. Heat waves occurred in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile in midAugust.
The situation was accompanied by increasingly severe natural disasters. All continents have suffered from heat waves, droughts, floods or fires, sometimes on a dramatic scale and with a high cost in human lives and economic and environmental resources.
Given these “inexorable mechanics” of warming, “we still do not recognize the gravity of the deeply structural nature of climate change,” says Belgian political scientist and researcher François Gemenne, one of the authors of the latest IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Climate change report. .
Until CO2 neutrality is reached, heat records will be broken “systematically, week after week, month after month, year after year,” he warns.
The next UN climate conference COP28, to be held in Dubai in two months, will have fossil energy abandonment as a central theme to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement and limit global warming to 1.5°C in the preindustrial era .
“Climate change favors an extension.” [no hemisfério norte] According to the IPCC experts’ forecasts, there will be heat waves until spring and until the month of September, including the beginning of October, explains climatologist Christine Berne.
This configuration, which is the result of greenhouse gas emissions caused mainly by the use of fossil fuels, has this time been combined with a meteorological phenomenon of hot air from the Sahara that is affecting Europe.
France, for example, is experiencing the hottest September in its history after a summer with exceptionally high temperatures.
The month, which began with a late heat wave, will be between 3.5 and 3.6 degrees Celsius above normal, with an average temperature of about 21.5 degrees Celsius, Berna said.
Global warming has led to a greater increase in temperatures in Europe than worldwide. Experts estimate that the global climate is already 1.2°C warmer than before the industrial era, an increase that reaches 1.8°C in France.