Climate Change | 2022 among the hottest year in history

The past year ranks among the hottest on record since pre-industrial times, the Copernicus program confirmed on Tuesday. This news comes as no surprise to climate experts, who also predict an increase in extreme weather events over the next few years.

The last eight hottest years

The year 2022 ranks 5^e rank of the hottest years, confirmed on Tuesday the European Program on Climate Change, better known as Copernicus. The global average temperature was 1.2°C warmer than in the pre-industrial era, despite the La Niña weather phenomenon and its cooling effect. Another finding from Copernicus: the last eight years have been the hottest ever recorded. “2022 has been another year of extreme phenomena in Europe and around the world. These events show that we are already experiencing the devastating consequences of global warming,” said Copernicus Deputy Director Samantha Burgess.

Europe smashes records

On the European continent, the year 2022 is the 2^e rank of the hottest years since the pre-industrial era, also notes Copernicus in its most recent annual report. Europe, which is warming on average twice as fast as the rest of the planet, has also shattered some records. The summer months were the hottest on record for the entire continent. Summer records were broken in a dozen countries, including the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Switzerland, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina also experienced the hottest year in their history. Elsewhere in the world, “large parts of the Middle East, Central Asia and China, New Zealand, North Africa and the Horn of Africa” also set a new annual record.

One more proof

The Copernicus data somewhat confirms those published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) last November in its report entitled Provisional state of the global climate 2022. The WMO was already able to predict that the last eight years, including 2022, were going to be the hottest on record. The organization had also estimated that the last year would be the 5^e or at 6^e ranked among the hottest years since the pre-industrial era. The Copernicus data come as no surprise to Bruno Tremblay, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University. He indicates that it would be practically impossible for such results to be due to mere chance. “This is further proof [du réchauffement climatique]. If it were random, it would be almost impossible for the last eight years to be the warmest. »

A record level of CO₂ in the air

Copernicus recalls that the concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) measured in the atmosphere reached a new high in 2022, at 417 parts per million (ppm), an annual increase of about 2.1 ppm, a rate similar to that of recent years. On January 8, the observatory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), located in Hawaii, noted a concentration of CO₂ of 419.25ppm. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes that this measure should be limited to 350 ppm in order to slow global warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century. The European agency also notes that the concentrations of methane, with a more intense but shorter warming power, are now at 1894 parts per billion (ppb). They increased “by almost 12 ppb, which is above average, but below the records of the last two years”.

More and more obvious manifestations

Over the past two years, several exceptional weather episodes bore the signature of global warming, also indicates a recent study by NOAA, an American agency specializing in the study of the oceans and the atmosphere. His analysis concludes that the severity of many weather events in 2021 and 2022 was indeed attributable to climate change. It should be noted that thanks to more efficient models, scientists are now able to measure more efficiently and more quickly the impact of the climate for a particular weather event. “We expect this type of event to be more frequent in the future,” confirms Bruno Tremblay.

With Agence France-Presse