Temperatures Rising Faster in Europe than Anywhere Else, Report Finds

Temperatures in Europe are ris­ing faster than on any other con­ti­nent, accord­ing to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

The report found that aver­age annual tem­per­a­tures in Europe have increased two-fold com­pared to the global aver­age of the past three decades. Officials worry that con­tin­u­ing this trend will threaten European com­mu­ni­ties’ health and hurt the econ­omy and envi­ron­ment.

However, the above-aver­age tem­per­a­ture rise expe­ri­enced in Europe does not sur­prise cli­ma­tol­o­gists.

“Global warm­ing does not fol­low the same pat­terns all around the planet,” Gianmaria Sannino, a cli­ma­tol­o­gist at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA), who was not directly involved in the study, told Olive Oil Times.

“It depends on many fac­tors, such as the dis­tri­b­u­tion of land and sea, as the sea can absorb heat way more than land,” he added. ​“This is among the rea­sons the north­ern hemi­sphere tends to become warmer than the south­ern.”

The 2021 State of Climate in Europe report found that tem­per­a­tures increased 0.5 ºC each decade from 1991 to 2021. While this sounds like a rel­a­tively minor increase, cli­ma­tol­o­gists warned that it has and will have sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences.

“Surface tem­per­a­tures are increas­ing as the heat is trapped in our atmos­phere by the green­house gases,” Sannino said. ​“That heat is energy. A huge quan­tity of energy, equal to five Hiroshima atomic bombs, det­o­nated in the atmos­phere every sec­ond for the last 40 years.”

Extraordinarily warm tem­per­a­tures cou­pled with chang­ing rain­fall pat­terns and lower vol­umes of pre­cip­i­ta­tion are among the causes of the ongo­ing drought, which is one of the most rel­e­vant impacts of cli­mate change in Europe.

The WMO report found that pre­cip­i­ta­tion deficits since 2018 have been recorded across Europe, with a more sig­nif­i­cant impact on the Iberian Peninsula and the Alps.

“In Europe, we are see­ing a sys­tem­atic reduc­tion of pre­cip­i­ta­tion,” Sannino said. ​“In the long run, Europe will have to face the increas­ing fre­quency of heat­waves, grow­ing water scarcity and sea level rise. Those are the three vari­ables most impact­ing the con­ti­nent, its pop­u­la­tion and agri­cul­ture.”

The WMO reported how dry con­di­tions cou­pled with repeated heat­waves in south­ern Europe resulted in dev­as­tat­ing wild­fires in Italy, Greece and Turkey, three major olive oil-pro­duc­ing coun­tries.

In 2021, wild­fires burned three times more area than the 2006 to 2020 aver­age across south­ern Europe and the Levant.

“Most dam­age from wild­fires is due to extreme events that rep­re­sent less than 2 per­cent of the total num­ber of fires,” the WMO report said. ​“These events, for which nei­ther ecosys­tems nor com­mu­ni­ties are adapted, can have sig­nif­i­cant socioe­co­nomic and eco­log­i­cal con­se­quences.”

“Climate change, human behav­iors and other under­ly­ing fac­tors are cre­at­ing the con­di­tions for more fre­quent, intense and dev­as­tat­ing fires in Europe,” the report added.

Along with the impacts of wild­fires, cli­mate change has a pro­found effect on European agri­cul­ture, mainly related to chang­ing pre­cip­i­ta­tion pat­terns and ris­ing tem­per­a­tures.

Citing data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the WMO said cli­mate change has resulted in shorter har­vest­ing peri­ods arriv­ing at dif­fer­ent moments of the year and changes to the plant­ing sea­son.

For exam­ple, the WMO cited the cold snap in the spring of 2021, which caused wide­spread dam­age to a range of crops across France and Italy, includ­ing olive trees.

“Climate change leads to eco­nomic impacts which trans­late into a loss of liveli­hoods, reduced agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion and pro­duc­tiv­ity, adverse effects on food avail­abil­ity and food access, and loss of income, which can con­tribute to food inse­cu­rity and lead to hunger and mal­nu­tri­tion,” the report said.

The report fur­ther found that changes to the jet stream, an air cur­rent that blows from west to east in the Northern Hemisphere, are among the most rel­e­vant dri­vers of cli­mate change in Europe.

“This river of high-speed air flow­ing at eight or nine kilo­me­ters above the sur­face is a con­veyor belt that deter­mines mete­o­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tions at mid­dle lat­i­tudes,” Sannino said. ​“It is affected by cli­mate change, and it is now mak­ing it eas­ier for hot air from Africa to come up to Europe more often, impact­ing the local tem­per­a­ture.”

Among the effects of the cli­mate cri­sis is the chang­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion, inci­dence and inten­sity of ani­mal and plant pests and dis­eases. European farm­ers, includ­ing olive grow­ers, have borne the brunt of these changes, with some strug­gling to cope with the inci­dence of new inva­sive species.

Bacteria such as the Xylella fas­tidiosa and insects such as the mar­morated stink bug or the Japanese bee­tle have dra­mat­i­cally impacted food pro­duc­tion and the land­scape in Europe.

The report found that 84 per­cent of the extreme weather events reported in the con­ti­nent were floods or storms, which directly affected more than 510,000 peo­ple, result­ing in hun­dreds of fatal­i­ties and more than €48 bil­lion of eco­nomic dam­age.

Sannino said atmos­pheric green­house gas con­cen­tra­tions fuel these extreme events.

“The cli­mate sys­tem has so much more energy to use, and that brings desta­bi­liza­tion in the atmos­phere, which starts act­ing in atyp­i­cal ways,” he said. ​“Those might be rel­a­tively small vari­a­tions, but they are suf­fi­cient to sig­nif­i­cantly alter the mete­o­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tions we have been used to in the last 30 or 40 years.”

For cen­turies, the Mediterranean basin expe­ri­enced very spe­cific and sta­ble weather con­di­tions, which have been highly ben­e­fi­cial for farm­ing.

“It has been spe­cial com­pared to the rest of the world,” Sannino said. ​“It was a favor­able and highly pre­dictable cli­mate. Farmers knew how the sea­sons would unfold. We still have a spe­cial cli­mate, but such unique­ness relates to faster and more evi­dent cli­mate change.”

The report also found that green­house gas emis­sions of the E.U. mem­bers have been reduced by 31 per­cent from 1990 to 2020, with a 35-per­cent reduc­tion tar­get before 2030. In other coun­tries in the region, the 2030 reduc­tion tar­gets range from 35 to 55 per­cent com­pared with 1990.

“On the mit­i­ga­tion side, the good pace in reduc­ing green­house gas emis­sions in the region should con­tinue, and ambi­tion should be fur­ther increased,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO sec­re­tary-gen­eral, while intro­duc­ing the report.

“Enhanced ambi­tion would demand that Europe plays a key role toward achiev­ing a car­bon neu­tral soci­ety by the mid­dle of the cen­tury, a nec­es­sary require­ment to limit the global tem­per­a­ture increase to well below 2 ºC while pur­su­ing efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 ºC, as spec­i­fied in the Paris Agreement,” he added.

• World Meteorological Organization