“Europe is the fastest warming region in the world. This observation was made by Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO), quoted in the foreword to the report, published on Monday June 19 and written with the European Copernicus program. The continent’s climate had warmed by 2.3 degrees in 2022 compared to the pre-industrial era (1850-1900), while the planet as a whole warmed by almost 1.2 degrees due to greenhouse gas emissions.
Another alarming indication is the rate of warming of the Old Continent. It is twice as fast as the average of the other five global weather regions since 1980. In November, the WMO reported that Europe had been warming at a rate of 0.5 degrees per decade since that date.
A warming that is not without consequences. “High temperatures have exacerbated intense and widespread droughts, fueled violent wildfires, responsible for the second largest area burned ever measured on the continent, and caused excess deaths per thousand from heat waves,” said Petteri Taalas.
In addition to the human cost, global warming has a financial cost. The economic damage, mostly linked to floods and storms, is estimated in total at around two billion dollars for the year 2022, far from the 50 billion for the year 2021 after exceptional floods.
The year 2022 is “unfortunately not a unique case or a climate oddity”, commented Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus climate change observatory. It “is part of a trend that will make extreme heat stress episodes more frequent and intense across the region.”
