Remember, the mercury has risen y’allto 47.4°C on August 14 in Montoro, in southern Spain, breaking the absolute national temperature record. A few days earlier, the Sicilians had been even hotter with a temperature rise of 48.8°C, making it inevitable that this heat wave in 2021 would be expected to unbalance the state of the climate. publishes this friday the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), European Earth Observation System. This is the fifth edition of this report that Copernicus publishes every spring on the occasion of Earth Day, always with a detailed focus on Europe.
“The past seven years have been the hottest on record”
An exercise that allows us to grasp the reality of climate change. “The past seven years have been the warmest on record, Copernicus confirmed this Friday. 2021 is no exception to the rule, even if it has been “between fifth and seventh place” in the past seven years, Copernicus specifies.
In other words, 2021 was mixed for Europe. Overall, surface temperatures were just 0.2°C above the 1991-2020 average, “so 2021 is not among the ten warmest years on record in Europe,” the report said. Spring was noticeably colder than average. However, it had started strongly at the end of March with high temperatures for this time of year, before suddenly succumbingto late periods of frost that hit agriculture in different parts of the continent. Especially in France.
A record summer in Europe
As for the summer that followed, it was the hottest on record. “A degree above the average of the past thirty years,” Copernicus specifies, who then recalls the heat waves, severe and long (up to three weeks), which touched the edge of the Mediterranean Sea† Especially Turkey, Greece and Italy. The drought has led to numerous and devastating forest fires. “The entire area that went up in smoke in the Mediterranean between July and August amounts to more than 800,000 hectares,” the report recalls. Enough to make it one of the most intense seasons, on the fire front, in thirty years in the region. Another sign of this particularly hot summer, Copernicus also recorded surface temperatures up to 5°C above average in several places in the Baltic Sea.
The Arctic, which is particularly vulnerable to climate change, is also a region closely monitored by Copernicus. Temperatures there in 2021 were colder than a year earlier, but 2020 was marked by abnormally high temperatures in the region, it should be noted. Yet, last year, CO2 emissions linked to wildfires in the Arctic, mainly in Eastern Siberia, were the fourth largest since they were recorded. That’s 2003. Sea ice has also reached its twelfth lowest level since satellite recordings began in 1979, the report continues. And for the ice on the Greenland Sea, it was more or less the lowest minimum size ever recorded.
CO2 and methane concentrations that continue to rise
Ultimately, the Earth continued to warm in 2021, even though the year is among the warmest in the past seven years. Copernicus invites us to have no illusions about this and to take a step back to realize it better. “There is a marked increase in surface temperatures, both on land and at sea, compared to pre-industrial levels,” the report said. These rose between 1.1 and 1.2°C. †
The same observation for the sea level, which has risen 9 cm since 1993, or the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. “The latest consolidated data, up to the end of 2020, shows that they have continued to lose mass,” Copernicus recalled. And this isn’t going to change? In any case, in 2021, global concentrations of CO2 and methane, two potent greenhouse gases, continued to increase, especially methane, Copernicus continues to report based on its estimates made from this data.
