A report published on Tuesday (23) by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center points out that almost half (47%) of the bloc’s territory is under drought alert conditions. The European summer is characterized as one of the driest on record, and countries like Italy, France, Germany and Norway are on surveillance in the face of what researchers point out as consequences of climate change.
“Europe was the region where the temperature increase was higher and faster in the last 30 years”, says climatologist José Álvaro Pimpão Silva, from the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Involved in producing the entity’s annual reports on the climate and its extremes, Silva warns that the worst may be yet to come: “The probability that one of the years in the period until 2026 will be the warmest is very high, estimated at 93 %.”
Born in Portugal, where he worked for 20 years at the Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera, Silva tells Sheet the good news—deaths have declined—and the bad news about the climate crisis—economic losses are increasing.
In 2022 and in recent years, European countries have recorded records of temperature, drought and fires. Because? Europe has been the region where the temperature rise has been the highest and fastest in the last 30 years. The frequency of extreme weather events has increased in the context of climate change, and the human contribution to global warming has made the occurrence of these phenomena much more likely today.
More probable? Yup. For example, they showed that the extreme heat event that set the UK temperature record, 40.3°C on 19 July 2022, was at least 10 times more likely than if we were in a world about 1.2 °C less hot.
Will Europe heat up more? The pace of global temperature rise is increasing, and each of the last four decades has been warmer than the last. Furthermore, the probability that one of the years in the period 2022-2026 will be the warmest is very high, estimated at 93%.
Has Europe suffered more than the rest of the world? I would not say that Europe suffers more. The climate crisis most acutely affects the most disadvantaged populations, and the greatest human losses occur in developing countries.
The deaths have increased? According to a WMO study, reporting on the period 1970-2019, there is a downward trend in the number of deaths globally. In the last decade, it was less than a third of those reported in the 1970s or 1980s. This reduction is even more significant because the number of disasters
climate change has more than tripled, from 711 in 1970-1979 to 3,165 in 2010-2019.
Because? This reduction has been attributed to advances in early warning systems. On the other hand, economic losses have been increasing. Extreme heat, from the point of view of victims, and floods, from the point of view of economic damage, stand out as the most devastating phenomena in Europe.
How do you think Europe should prepare? It is important to understand that there are limits to adaptation. Limiting global warming to 1.5°C, as set out in the Paris Agreement, is not just a number. While adaptation can play an important role in anticipating and reducing risk, the main role in reducing future consequences and impacts is very much dependent on the mitigation and effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions globally.
It is not possible to anticipate, months in advance, the location, date and intensity of a particular extreme phenomenon. It is known, however, that these are increasingly likely and intense in a context of climate change. For example: for each degree of global temperature increase, extreme rainfall events intensify by an additional 7%.
What warnings does this crisis send to the Southern Hemisphere, to Brazil? Recently, the WMO Report on the State of Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2021 was published, in which some topics of relevance to South America were highlighted, including the drought in Chile and the Paraná basin, the reduction of glaciers in the Andes, the events of heavy rains and floods in parts of Brazil and the increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, which in 2021 reached the highest value since 2009, about double the 2009-2018 average.
How do you know that this is caused by historic climate change, and not just a consequence of a few warmer years? We are absolutely outside the realm of natural climate variability. Man’s influence on the warming of the earth’s surface is incomparably greater than any natural cause. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is the highest in at least 2 million years for carbon dioxide and the last 800,000 years for methane and nitrous oxide.
And what about the oceans? The heat accumulated in the ocean is one of the best indicators of climate change, and even stopping greenhouse gas emissions, this change will be irreversible for several centuries to millennia. A warmer ocean expands, contributing to mean sea level rise. Arctic ice has the lowest values in at least 1,000 years. In the last 40 years, the decrease was about 40%.
Have you ever tried to convince a denialist that global warming is a reality? Yes already. Sometimes successfully. The best way is with science, exposing all the facts and arguments that the last decades have brought to the understanding and explanation of the effect of human influence on climate warming. Furthermore, young people are increasingly aware of the climate crisis that
we cross. They are important educators and communicators, helping to combat misinformation.
What situation would the planet be in today if human civilization did not exist? What I can convey is that, with post-industrial revolution human civilization, Earth is not doing well. The global average temperature is about 1.1°C above pre-industrial values, the anomaly being even higher over the continents. The last seven years were the warmest on record, and in 2021, four key indicators of the climate system reached new record values: the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the rise in mean sea level, the ocean calorific value and ocean acidification. The climate emergency was caused by man and must be resolved by man.
X-ray | José Álvaro Pimpão Silva, 44
With a background in geography and climatology, he worked for about 20 years at the Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera. Today, he works at the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO), where he collaborates in the preparation of annual reports on the climate and its extremes on the planet.
