British Petroleum Silent When Asked "How Long Do We Have?" Meanwhile...Europe warms at twice the rate of the global average!
Europe is warming almost twice as fast as the global average, at about 2.2C above pre-industrial times. Scientists confirmed this week that summer 2023 was the hottest season the world has ever seen by a large margin. Climate change impacts caused more than 2 billion in damages for Europe alone last year and costs are expected to double ever year as we see more extreme weather events occur. Wet bulb deaths are seeing a dramatic rise and the heat as barely just started, as average temp is expected 2 rise by 2 degrees centigrade in less than 2 decades most countries refuse to embrace renewable energy and lose gas and oil profits for the top 3 percent.
According to a report issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, during 2022, multiple nations in the region had their warmest year on record but the expanded use of renewable energy provides a silver lining. Extreme heat, drought and wildfire, marine heatwaves, unprecedented glacier melt – the State of the Climate in Europe 2022 report, shows that decades of accelerated heating has had far-reaching impacts on the region’s socio-economic fabric and ecosystems.
Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom had their warmest year on record last year and the summer in Europe was the hottest ever recorded. The 2022 annual average temperature for Europe was between the second and fourth highest on record, with an anomaly of about 0.79 °C above the 1991–2020 average.
With precipitation below average across much of the region in 2022, France had its driest January to September, and the United Kingdom had its driest January to August since 1976, with far-reaching consequences for agriculture and energy production. Spain’s water reserves decreased to 41.9 per cent of total capacity by 26 July, with even lower capacity in some basins. Glaciers in Europe lost about 880 cubic kilometers of ice from 1997 to 2022.
The Alps were worst affected, with an average reduction in ice thickness of 34 meters. In 2022, glaciers in the Alps experienced a new record loss of mass in a single year, triggered by low winter snowfall, an extremely warm summer and dust deposits from the Sahara. The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet contributed around 14.9 mm to global mean sea-level rise. And according to scientific assessments, it continued to lose mass during 2022, said the WMO report.
Average sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic were the warmest on record and large portions of the region’s seas were affected by powerful marine heatwaves. The rates of surface ocean warming, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean, the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the southern Arctic, were more than three times the global average. Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.
Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.
But that’s only the beginning, according to the report, issued on Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in.
Nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die-offs. By 2030, the European continent could see more than 70,000 heat-related deaths every summer. By 2050, each summer's deaths could top 150,000. Nearly 62,000 people died heat-related deaths last year during Europe's hottest summer on record, a new study has found — more heartbreaking evidence that heat is a silent killer, and its victims are vastly under-counted.
“We can expect a significant jump in extreme weather over the next 20 or 30 years,” said Piers Forster, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds and one of hundreds of international experts who helped write the report. “Things are unfortunately likely to get worse than they are today.”
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