October 2022 was the hottest ever recorded in Europe, according to Copernicus

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Average temperatures were “close to 2 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 reference period,” the Copernicus service said in a statement.

October 2022 was the warmest October ever recorded in Europe, Europe’s Copernicus atmospheric and climate change monitoring agency announced today, following a summer of record temperatures.

Average temperatures were “close to 2 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 reference period,” Copernicus said in a statement.

The European agency, which has no comparable data before the period 1991-2020, had already announced that the summer of 2022 was the hottest on record (with temperatures around 1.34 degrees Celsius above normal).

“The serious consequences of climate change are now evident and we need ambitious climate action during COP27 to guarantee emissions reductions to stabilize temperatures at a level close to the 1.5 degree target set by the agreement of Paris,” commented Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

According to the European agency, “a heatwave caused record temperatures in western Europe and an October with record temperatures in Austria, Switzerland and France, as well as much of Italy and Spain.”

The European continent is the one where the temperature rises the most on Earth.

Over the past 30 years, Europe has seen temperatures rise more than twice the global average, with temperatures rising by about 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the C3S released on November 2nd.

In October, in some parts of the continent, this unnatural heat was added to the anombria, as it had been during the summer. “The weather was drier than average over most of southern Europe and the Caucasus,” according to Copernicus.

In contrast, “in the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula, parts of France and Germany, the United Kingdom and Ireland, north-west Scandinavia, much of eastern Europe and central Turkey, the weather was wetter than the average”.

In the rest of the world, Copernicus reports that “Canada experienced record heat and much warmer than average temperatures were also seen in Greenland and Siberia.”

Instead, “colder-than-average temperatures were recorded in Australia, the eastern tip of Russia and parts of West Antarctica.”

Since the end of the 19th century, the Earth’s temperature has increased by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius, and about half of that increase has occurred during the last 30 years. This year is expected to be the fifth or sixth warmest on record, despite the fact that since 2020 we have the effect of La Niña, a periodic natural phenomenon in the Pacific that cools the atmosphere.

RES-EMP

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