Climate change threatens Europe with new weather extremes

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Climate change produced another record-breaking year of extreme weather in Europe in 2021, triggering catastrophic flooding and the hottest summer on record, according to scientists at the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Summer temperatures in Europe last year were one degree Celsius above the average of the previous 20 years, and the rainfall that battered Germany and Belgium broke records, the scientists said in their annual European State of the Climate report. Globally, the last seven years have been the warmest since records began in 1850, with 2021 ranking sixth. There were worrying findings in terms of greenhouse emissions, too: concentrations of carbon dioxide and particularly methane continued to rise in the atmosphere.

“The continued increase in greenhouse gases is the main driver behind the global increase in temperatures,” said Freja Vamborg, senior scientist at Copernicus and the lead author of the report. “The key messages are forever repeated and will not change in the near future unless something changes radically.”

The report also painted a stark picture of climate change in the Arctic, with wildfires mostly from eastern Siberia contributing to the fourth highest amount of carbon emissions from such events in the region. At the same time, sea ice retreated to its 12th lowest since 1979, while the Greenland Sea saw its lowest coverage ever. Still, Arctic temperatures were less extreme than 2020 and were even colder than usual in some areas at certain times of the year.

Methane — which has 84 times the warming potential of CO2 over a short timeframe — jumped by 16.5 parts per billion, marking a second consecutive year of sharp increases. The cause of the rise was unclear, the scientists said, though a large