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Heat waves have been the order of the day in Europe in recent summers.
Photo: Jan Eifert / imago images
2020 will certainly go down in the history books as the »Corona year«.
But it is also another hot year and therefore part of a problem that will still be there after the pandemic: the climate crisis.
The past year is part of a warming series.
The World Weather Organization (WMO) declared 2020 one of the three hottest years since temperature records began in the mid-19th century.
It almost turned into a heat record year.
It is just behind 2016, said the WMO this week in Geneva.
The reason is the naturally occurring cooling weather phenomenon La Niña.
That caused a slight cooling at the very end of the year.
La Niña usually follows El Niño.
The latter ensures that the comparatively cool water off the Pacific coast of South America is heated.
La Niña, on the other hand, is accompanied by stronger trade winds, which ensure cooler surface water off the coast of Peru.
Both phenomena have practical global effects including, depending on the region, droughts and heavy rainfall.
These data are also confirmed by a NASA institute.
The differences between 2016 and 2020 are insignificant, said Gavin Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at NASA.
"Whether a year is a record or not is irrelevant because it depends on the long-term trends." It is to be expected that further records will be broken due to climate change.
According to the NASA Institute, the past seven years are already the warmest since modern records began almost a century and a half ago.
Europe was 1.6 degrees warmer
The world is not heating up to the same extent everywhere.
The Arctic was once again a heat hotspot in 2020.
There, the extent of the sea ice in July and October was lower than ever since the measurements began.
In Europe, 2020 was the warmest year on record.
It was on average 1.6 degrees Celsius warmer than in the reference period 1981 to 2010 - and 0.4 degrees warmer than in the previous record year 2019, as reported by the European Copernicus Climate Change Service, which includes values since 1950.
Worldwide, 2020 almost broke the previous record for the global average temperature.
The global average temperature was 14.9 degrees and thus 1.2 degrees more than the pre-industrial level (1850-1900).
The temperature of the oceans also reached a new record high in 2020.
Researchers report that the seawater absorbed an extraordinary amount of heat energy up to a depth of 2000 meters.
The pandemic should not be an excuse to ease the climate effort, appealed
Petteri Taalas, General Secretary of the WMO.
He urged countries to pay particular attention to climate-friendly energy when restarting after the crisis.
The consequences of the pandemic are serious, but limited in time.
"But if we don't reduce greenhouse gases and tackle climate change, this will have consequences for the economy, living conditions and ecosystems on land and in the sea for centuries."
Icon: The mirror
sug / dpa
