October 2022 was the warmest month on record in Europe, the European climate change service Copernicus announced, following a record summer.
Average temperatures were “nearly 2°C above the 1991-2020″ reference period, Copernicus said in a statement.
The European service, which does not have comparable records before the period 1991-2020, had already announced that the summer of 2022 was the warmest on record (about 1.34°C above normal).
“The serious consequences of climate change are now clear and we need ambitious climate action at COP27 to ensure emissions reductions to stabilize temperatures close to the 1.5 degree target set by the Paris Agreement,” commented Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
According to the European service, “a heat wave has resulted in record daily temperatures in Western Europe, and a record October for Austria, Switzerland and France, as well as for much of Italy and Spain.”
The European continent is the fastest warming continent on Earth.
Over the past 30 years, Europe has experienced a temperature increase more than twice the global average, with warming of about +0.5°C per decade, according to a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and C3S report released on November 2.
In October, in some parts of the continent, this abnormally hot weather was combined, as in the summer, with a deficit of rainfall.
“The weather was drier than average over most of southern Europe and
Caucasus”, notes Copernicus.
On the other hand, “over the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, parts of France and Germany, the United Kingdom and Ireland, northwest Scandinavia, much of Eastern Europe and central Turkey, the weather was wetter than average.
In the rest of the world, Copernicus notes that “Canada experienced record heat, and much warmer than average temperatures were also observed in Greenland and Siberia.
On the contrary, “the coldest temperatures compared to the average were recorded in Australia, in the far east of Russia and in parts of West Antarctica”.
Since the end of the 19th century, the Earth has warmed by nearly 1.2°C, with about half of this increase occurring in the last 30 years. This year is on track to be the fifth or sixth warmest on record despite the impact since 2020 of La Nina – a periodic, natural phenomenon in the Pacific that cools the atmosphere.
