The planet continued to be firmly in warming’s grip last year, with severe summer temperatures in Europe, China and elsewhere adding to 2022 being the fifth hottest year on record, European weather scientists said on Tuesday.
The 8 hottest years recorded have now taken place since 2014, the researchers, from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, found, and 2016 continues to be the hottest year ever.
Today the earth is 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it had been during the second half of the 19th century, when CO2 emissions from non – renewable fuels became widespread.
Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus service, pointed out the main warming trend since the pre-industrial era made 2022’s position in the top 5 “neither unanticipated or unsurprising.”
“The rare event now would be to see a really cold year,” he said.
2022 average temperature anomaly compared with 1981–2010 average
Last year was among the warmest despite the persistence of La Niña for the third consecutive year. La Niña is a climate pattern marked by colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean that tend to suppress global temperatures.
“We are continuing the long-term warming trend of the planet,” said Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at Berkeley Earth, an independent organization that analyzes environmental data. “If you draw a straight line through temperatures since 1970, 2022 lands almost exactly on where you’d expect temperatures to be.”
Berkeley Earth will issue its own analysis of 2022 data later this week, as will NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Temperature records broken during Europe’s hottest summer
Copernicus declared Europe had its hottest summer ever in 2022, with a number of heat waves coming throughout the continent and setting temperature records in most urban areas. Separate research indicates that heat waves are growing a lot quicker in intensity and frequency in Europe than they’re elsewhere, fueled by warming, but also by shifts in oceanic and atmospheric circulation.
This warm season even felt its effects someplace else in the world. In 2022, India, Pakistan, and Central and eastern China endured long and severe heat waves, as well as the monsoon floods in Pakistan ravaged a lot of the nation. The high temperature and associated dryness additionally played a role in substantial wildfires in the Western United States.
