Climate: The last seven years are the hottest on record

To rewind the meteorological year 2021 is to dive into a disaster film scenario.

Exceptional "heat dome" in western North America, wildfires of unprecedented scale in Greece, monster floods in Europe, giant fire in California, unusually high temperatures in the Arctic Circle and record rainfall in Paris… confirming all the forecasts established for decades by climatologists, the weather is indeed racing.

According to data from the European Climate Change Observatory Copernicus (CAMS), which was released on Monday, the year 2021 is among the seven hottest on record.

At the same time, global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane (responsible for global warming) continue to rise.

VIDEO.

"We can't breathe": when the American West was suffocating under record heat this summer

Europe has had its hottest summer

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Globally, 2021 was the fifth hottest year on record.

If we zoom in on Europe, we see that the ten hottest years lived on the old continent have all taken place since 2020. Last summer was even the hottest Europe has ever known.

“The Mediterranean region experienced a heat wave during the month of July and part of August,” emphasizes the Copernicus observatory.

As a result, high temperatures in Greece, Spain and Italy and a record broken in Sicily where we recorded 48.8 ° C, 0.8 ° C more than the previous one.

“Hot and dry conditions preceded intense and prolonged forest fires, especially in the eastern and central Mediterranean.

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Monster fires

. Among the most visible effects of this sweltering heat are fires. The geo-intelligence service of the Kermap territories recalls that the "heat dome" of "unprecedented vigor which affected the western part of North America resulted in a fire and" the almost complete destruction of the village of Lytton, where the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada had just been observed: an incredible 49.6 ° C ”. The Copernicus Observatory recalls for its part that 2021 was marked by "the second largest fire recorded in the history of California, the Dixie Fire". “It has not only caused widespread devastation, but has also resulted in a significant reduction in air quality for thousands of people,” European climatologists point out.

CO2 and methane levels are skyrocketing

. Immediate consequence of these gigantic fires in America: "Air quality has been reduced across the continent, particles and other pyrogenic pollutants emitted by fires having been transported to the East", underlines the Copernicus Observatory. In total, North America has experienced the greatest amount of carbon emissions of all the summers recorded by CAMS since 2003. Something to alarm its director Vincent-Henri Peuch, because CO2 contributes to global warming: “The concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane continue to increase year after year with no signs of slowing down. However, these greenhouse gases are the main drivers of climate change. "

It rained atop Greenland

. It was August 14 at more than 3000 m altitude. Where the snow is supposed to fall, at the top of Greenland, it rained and the event marked climatologists who continued in 2021 to record temperature anomalies from one end of the planet to the other. At the North Pole, for example, Kermap recalls that "the Arctic Circle has experienced historic heat peaks with temperatures 10 to 20 ° C above normal and an absolute record of 38 ° recorded in Verkhoyansk (Russia) on May 19" .

Floods in Europe and record rains in Paris

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Even if it is a priori counter-intuitive, global warming also favors the phenomena of extreme rain.

It was well measured this summer in Europe where exceptional floods affected Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Paris even broke a precipitation record on June 27 with more than 58 m of water falling in one day, pulverizing the previous record of 44.57 mm which dated from May 2016. “Torrential rains, very harsh storms , increasingly devastating cyclones, that's what awaits us, confided to us last summer a researcher member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Tomorrow will be the norm.

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