AFPBut little snow in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the end of January
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 20:20
Last month was the warmest January on record, breaking heat records for eight months in a row. It is also the first time that the often mentioned 1.5 degree warming from the Paris climate agreement has been exceeded for a whole year in a row. Data from the European climate service Copernicus shows that it has now been more than 1.5 degrees warmer for twelve months in a row than in pre-industrial times.
In particular, the consistently passed 1.5 degree is seen as a worrying milestone. In 2015, world leaders agreed at the climate summit in Paris to strive to keep global warming well below 2 degrees, preferably below 1.5 degrees. Since then, it has often been about the serious and irreversible consequences for the earth that scientists expect from such global warming.
Climate scientist Bart Verheggen of the KNMI calls the past year exceptional. “It is of course not surprising, but it does show what the warming looks like. We notice on all sides, including in the Netherlands, how the extremes are increasing. It was dry until June, then it started pouring down. We have not had heat waves, but we have also had to deal with them in recent years.”
Sea as warm as in August
Not only on land are noticeable last year and the first months of this year, the average sea water temperature worldwide is also significantly higher. Currently the water surface is slightly less warm than the record temperatures of August last year, but it is February.
NOAA/ClimateReanalyzer.org/Climate Change Institute/University of Maine
“Reducing greenhouse gas emissions quickly is the only way to stop global temperature rise,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy head of Copernicus. Other scientists also warn that the process can be slowed down by reducing CO2 emissions.
Volcano eruption and sulfur particles
Verheggen agrees with this. “And in addition to warming greenhouse gases, El Niño is a big one push. We are still relatively in the dark about the further causes, but a factor may also be that shipping fuel has been allowed to contain less sulfur since 2020. The fact that fewer of those reflective particles are emitted could also lead to warming.”
Verheggen also mentions the eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano in the Pacific Ocean in 2022 as a factor. “That is an undersea volcano. When it erupted, a lot of water vapor ended up in the stratosphere. That also warms. But just like the sulfur particles, that cannot be the whole answer and to what extent it played a role remains to be determined. to be examined.”
Part of it could also simply be a matter of coincidence, Verheggen continues. “You are also dealing with natural variation. And that die with natural variation has now rolled in the warm direction. There is also a coincidence in it.”
Paris not lost
Although the year above 1.5 degrees can be called a signal, the Paris agreements are not yet lost, Verheggen also says. These agreements, and climate science as a whole, revolve around long-term averages and not about peaks and valleys in annual figures. “The UN climate panel has proposed to look at the twenty-year average. So it certainly does not amount to one year, also due to that annual variability.”
The warming weather phenomenon El Niño is expected to come to an end in the coming months, which will eliminate at least one cause of the increased temperature. However, it is expected that temperatures will continue to rise in the coming years, as long as greenhouse gas emissions continue. Verheggen: “As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, we will continue to climb.”
2024-02-08 19:20:36
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