Climate change whipsawed through Europe last year, alternately baking locked-up economies beneath record heat before inundating them with unprecedented floods, underscoring the rising levels of uncertainty faced by the continent’s 500 million people as the planet warms.
Last year was one of the three warmest ever recorded in Europe and caps a six-year span when it’s never been hotter, according to scientists at the Copernicus Climate Change Service. While pandemic-induced economic lockdowns reduced European Union emissions by almost a tenth, they didn’t prevent an overall increase in manmade greenhouse gases. The far North is feeling the changes most acutely.
“The region that stands out is the Arctic,” said Freja Vamborg, one of the scientists who wrote the annual European State of the Climate report published Thursday. “The Arctic is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world, as is Europe.”
“Some of this process is irreversible,” said Mark Parrington, a Copernicus scientist who studies fire emissions. “Those fires released carbon that has been captured for thousands of years into the atmosphere.”
“Achieving a climate neutral economy requires the full mobilization of society, governments and industry,” the European Commission’s Matthias Petschke said in a statement.
Copernicus estimates global emissions fell 8% last year due to economic contractions and would have declined further if people working at home didn’t rely on burning natural gas and oil to keep warm, according to Vincent-Henri Peuch, who heads the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service.
Those periods of hot and dry weather were interspersed with deluges three times the monthly averages that caused devastating floods in some regions. Storm Alex in October dumped record one-day rainfall across the U.K., northwestern France and the southern Alps. A rare tropical cyclone called Medicane Lanos swept through Greece in September, killing four people and causing some $100 million in damages.