News coverage of an unseasonably warm early January throughout a vast area stretching from Russia to the Mediterranean is not best illustrated with beach weather pictures. This is a “winter heatwave” indicating weather patterns are out of kilter, with climate disruption likely to be an aggravating factor.
At least eight European countries experienced record January temperatures in the opening days of the new year. What has worried climatologists is the scale of temperature increases.This is in a scenario when fractions of a degree rises in average global temperatures have a profound effect on climate, exacerbating extreme weather events, undermining biodiversity and destabilising fragile ecosystems.
Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks global weather extremes, concluded it was “totally insane” as some high night-time temperatures observed were uncommon in midsummer. It is “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” he wrote, “Nothing stands close to this.”
This is exactly the kind of abnormal event that is progressively rewriting global climatology. It is yet further indication of the consequences of a warming world due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activities.
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2022 ended with a shiver but the start of 2023 broke a sweat, Nasa Earth Observatory observed. The December “bomb cyclone” in North America coinciding with a cold snap in much of Europe, was followed by sharp rises in temperature across much of the northern hemisphere. The exact scientific reasons behind the stretching of the polar vortex in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that triggers such severe cold snaps in the midlatitudes of North America – notably the extent to which climate change is involved – are not clear.
But a warming world makes extreme episodes more likely, and for much of Europe it also comes with the prospect of winter reduced to a few months of damp and mild weather with little by way of frost, ice or snow.