According to official numbers released on Thursday, Britain had its hottest year on record in 2022. This is the most recent indication that climate change is altering the weather in Europe.
According to the Met Office, the preliminary annual average temperature in the United Kingdom was 10.03 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the highest recorded temperature since such records started being kept in 1884. The previous record for the temperature was 9.88 degrees Celsius (49.8 degrees Fahrenheit), which was achieved in 2014.
According to researchers at the Met Office, human activity, namely emissions from fossil fuels, has significantly increased the likelihood of such warm circumstances occurring. The ten warmest years ever recorded in Britain have all taken place since 2003.
According to a climate attribution expert at the Met Office named Nikos Christidis, “the findings suggested that recording 10C in a normal climate would occur roughly once every 500 years, however in our present climate it may happen as regularly as once every three to four years.”
The United Kingdom is not on its own. 2022 was the warmest year in France’s recorded history, with an annual average temperature that was higher than 14 Celsius (57.2 Fahrenheit), making it the hottest year since meteorological observations first started in 1900. The meteorological office of Switzerland said that their country’s yearly average temperature of 7.4 degrees Celsius (45.33 degrees Fahrenheit) was “by far the greatest figure since observations started in 1864.”
According to Spain’s national meteorological office Aemet, the country also saw its warmest year since records began being kept in 1961, with an average daily temperature of 15.4 degrees Celsius (59.7 Fahrenheit). According to what was read, the southern European nation’s four warmest years on record have all occurred after the year 2015.
The summer of 2016 was characterised by widespread drought and heat waves over most of Europe. For the first time in recorded history, the temperature in Britain climbed beyond 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). The Svalbard islands in the Arctic, which are part of Norway, saw its hottest summer in almost a century’s worth of record-keeping. According to the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, the average temperature of the archipelago for the months of June, July, and August was 7.4 degrees Celsius (45.3 degrees Fahrenheit).
Autumn brought additional severe rain to areas of Europe, notably the hilly Italian island of Ischia, which is where strong rains in November caused a large landslide that drove vehicles and houses into the water and resulted in the deaths of at least a dozen people.
In contrast to the United States and Canada, which have been afflicted by severe cold and snowstorms, a significant portion of Europe is in the midst of an exceptionally mild winter.
The conclusion of the year in Germany was marked by the hottest New Year’s Eve on record, with temperatures hitting 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit) in the southern region of the nation. Belarus, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland, and the Netherlands each established a new national record for the highest day temperature on either December 31 or January 1.
At the beginning of the year 2023, numerous ski resorts in the Alps, the Pyrenees, and other European ranges are suffering from a shortage of snow. These resorts are located at low and medium altitudes.
Even the creation of artificial snow has been rendered impossible by the springlike climate in Bosnia; either the temperature is too high to allow for its production, or the snow melts almost immediately after being spewed out onto the slopes. On Wednesday, the snowfall that had accumulated on the slopes of Bjelasnica, which is located close to Sarajevo, consisted of nothing more than a few white spots on an otherwise grassy landscape of brown and green.