Summer 2022 Was Europe's Hottest on Record

The last eight years have been the warmest ever recorded, and in 2022, the Earth’s sur­face tem­per­a­ture reached peaks not seen since 1940. Europe also expe­ri­enced its hottest sum­mer ever.

The 2022 global cli­mate report issued by the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service shows that 2022 was a record year for extreme weather events. They have plagued farm­ing and affected pop­u­la­tions at all lat­i­tudes.

Last year, the entire globe was affected by the per­sis­tence of the La Nina phe­nom­e­non, which pro­voked an abnor­mal cool­ing of the oceans.

Such con­di­tions are typ­i­cally asso­ci­ated with large-scale weather events, such as the droughts found in vast areas of the U.S., Europe and China or the mas­sive floods that hit Pakistan in August.

Additionally, Pakistan and India were struck by pro­longed heat­waves in May and June, with sig­nif­i­cant heat­waves also hit­ting China and Europe in sub­se­quent weeks.

The swel­ter­ing sum­mer weighed on the European pop­u­la­tion and cur­tailed farm­ing, includ­ing olive oil pro­duc­tion. Low rain­fall lev­els reported in west­ern and south­ern Europe con­tributed to the drought con­di­tions that so heav­ily slashed agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion. The heat waves also did not spare north­ern Europe.

On top of that, the world’s most rel­e­vant olive oil-pro­duc­ing region has seen an increase in the num­ber of wild­fires trig­gered by dry con­di­tions. In 2022, coun­tries such as Spain, France, Germany, and Slovenia recorded the high­est wild­fire emis­sions in the last 20 years.

According to Copernicus, sur­face tem­per­a­tures in Europe con­tinue to grow more than the global aver­age. In the last 30 years, they have risen twice as fast as any other con­ti­nent.

“The regions that saw the warmest year on record, includ­ing large parts of west­ern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and China, South Korea, New Zealand, north-west­ern Africa and the Horn of Africa,” a Copernicus press note high­lighted.

In 2022, record tem­per­a­tures were also reported in the Earth’s polar regions.

Experts con­sider human activ­i­ties to be the main trig­ger of the cur­rent global cli­mate cri­sis. These activ­i­ties cause the release of green­house gases into the atmos­phere, thus rais­ing the sur­face tem­per­a­ture.

More specif­i­cally, Copernicus recorded that car­bon diox­ide con­cen­tra­tions have grown by 2.1 parts per mil­lion (ppm), which is con­sis­tent with the trend of the past few years. Other rel­e­vant pol­luters, such as methane, have increased by 12 parts per bil­lion (ppb), slightly higher than aver­age but below the record highs of the last two years.

“This resulted in an annual aver­age for 2022 of approx­i­mately 417 ppm for car­bon diox­ide and 1894 ppb for methane. For both gases, this is the high­est con­cen­tra­tions from the satel­lite record, and by includ­ing other records, the high­est lev­els for over 2 mil­lion years for car­bon diox­ide and over 800.000 years for methane,” the Copernicus obser­va­tory reported.

“Greenhouse gases, includ­ing car­bon diox­ide and methane, are the main dri­vers of cli­mate change, and we can see from our mon­i­tor­ing activ­i­ties that atmos­pheric con­cen­tra­tions are con­tin­u­ing to rise with no signs of slow­ing,” said Vincent-Henri Peuch, direc­tor of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.

• The Copernicus ser­vice
• 2021 Was Earth’s Fifth Hottest Year, Scientists Say