The alarm bell is being sounded more and more by the scientific community regarding the increase in temperature and global warming. Recorded temperatures are breaking hundreds of records, as scientists warn that 2023 is expected to be the hottest year on record for the entire planet.

Already, this year’s October has been exceptionally warm for several regions worldwide and was recorded as the warmest October since 1979making it the 5th consecutive month (after June, July, August and September 2023) to be recorded as the warmest on record worldwide for 2023.

“This is the hottest year on record, globally. The previous year was not as warm compared to this one, it is a long term climate trend. It is true that we are in a trend where there is an increase in temperature, but we cannot say that next year we will experience the same”, the hydrologist and emeritus director of research at the French research institute for development points out to the Athenian-Macedonian News Agency, and member of the research group for water sciences in Montpellier, Pierre Chevalier.

Mr. Chevalier is relatively pessimistic about the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, while stressing that more steps need to be taken to win that bet. “It’s a matter of education, awareness. There are tools. Local actions are needed where both the local authorities and the Regions will participate, while it is necessary for young people to have an active role in them”, he emphasizes characteristically in APE-MPE.

For him special emphasis should be given to the issue of drought as, as he explains, dry spells are now longer. “Drought is the most difficult thing we have to manage. We have longer dry spells. Is true. We must, however, make sure we have good crops in good soil”, he emphasizes and adds that before we grow anything we need to check the soil: “We must essentially grow the right plants in the right soil”.

At the same time, he notes that serious consideration should be given to the problem of water runoff and channeling that occurs after heavy rainfall, while adding that the extreme flooding phenomena that many areas of the Mediterranean experienced this September will be experienced again, but without it being possible to the present to predict when and how often.

“From the 1970s onwards we see that each decade has been warmer than the last. 2023 will be the hottest year on record.” climatologist Françoise Vime said for her part, in her lecture as part of the “1st Science Festival: Water at the Whirlwind of the Climate Crisis”, organized by the French Institute of Greece from November 9-16.

As she said, Mrs. Vimé “in the European Continent it is observed that for 30-40 years Europe has been overheating more than twice as fast as the global average». “This warming we are seeing is unprecedented. The speed and scope of change is unprecedented in recent years,” he underlined, adding that the 21st century is witnessing an intensification of drought.

The planet is “a breath away” from the limit of +1.5 degrees Celsius of the Paris Agreement, according to the research director of the National Observatory of Athens, Costas Lagouvardos. “By the first decade of 2023 the average temperature of the planet is at +1.4 relative to the pre-industrial period. We are now getting very close to the +1.5 mark. We will get there very soon”, Mr. Lagouvardos points out to APE-MBE.

In addition, Mr. Lagouvardos emphasizes that in Northern Greece in the last 30 years the rate of temperature increase is greater. “In the last 30 years that we find that the temperature in our country is increasing, we notice that in Northern Greece it is increasing faster than other regions. In other words, the rate of temperature increase in our country is greater in the north than in the south”, he says.

According to the climatebook page and data from the Copernicus service, in Greece the temperature in October 2023 fluctuated well above the average of the period 1991-2020, recording one of the warmest October months of the last 30 years.