The world is getting hotter – in the past year, surprising records have made climate change more apparent than ever. In Europe, average temperatures have already increased by 2.2 degrees compared to pre-industrial times.
The approaching weather phenomenon El Niño also does not bode well, warns the World Weather Organization (WMO) in its climate report for 2022. Because El Niño has a warming effect, researchers could soon set a global temperature record.
The El Niño event likely to develop over the course of this year “first of all raises the likelihood that 2023 and 2024 will match or surpass the previous record value set in 2016 in terms of global mean temperature,” said Andreas Fink of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).
Helge Goessling of the Alfred-Wegener-Institute (AWI) in Bremerhaven takes a similar view: it could very well be that “new world records will be set in 2023 or 2024”. Karsten Haustein of the Institute of Meteorology at the University of Leipzig even considers it conceivable that the year 2024 “will also cross the 1.5 degree mark globally for the first time on an annual basis”.
Climate protection efforts are not enough
The countries of the world actually want to prevent a warming of more than 1.5 degrees as much as possible. This is stated in the Paris climate agreement. But the efforts made so far in the field of climate protection are far from sufficient. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has shown that the target is likely to be exceeded many years before average global temperatures fall again – but only if countries take significantly more stringent climate protection measures.
2022 brought many heat records
Records set in 2022 include a new low in Antarctic sea ice, a new spike in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, the largest glacier melt in Europe and the highest ocean heat content, the WMO report said. The values always refer to the beginning of the measurements, which are several decades or more in the past.
The WMO confirmed that 2022 was the fifth or sixth warmest year since industrialization, with plus 1.15 degrees above the average for the years 1850 to 1900. The measured values are so close that it is impossible to distinguish them precisely. 2015 to 2022 were the eight warmest years.
Developments this year, and especially next year, will probably be determined by El Niño. “At the moment it looks very likely that 2023 will be the first strong El Niño since 2015/2016,” says climate scientist Haustein. El Niño is characterized by altered ocean and atmospheric currents and higher ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. According to Haustein, El Niño has only a minor influence on the weather in Europe.
Source: Krone
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