Abnormally warm winter in Europe breaks records
2023.01.04 11:56
Abnormally warm winter in Europe breaks records
Budrigannews.com – Over the new year, parts of Europe experienced record-high winter temperatures, prompting activists to demand swifter action against climate change and providing governments struggling with high gas prices with a temporary respite.
From Switzerland to Poland to Hungary, hundreds of temperature records have been broken in the past few days. Budapest had its warmest Christmas Eve ever, reaching 18.9 degrees Celsius (66.02 degrees Fahrenheit) on January 1.
On New Year’s Day, while normally bustling European ski resorts were deserted due to a lack of snow, temperatures climbed to nearly 25 degrees Celsius in the southwest of France, where the night of December 30/31 was the warmest since records began.
Czech Television reported that some trees in private gardens were beginning to bloom, and the Swiss Meteorological and Climatological Office warned allergy sufferers about pollen from early blooming hazel plants.
At the airport in Bilbao, Spain, the temperature reached 25.1 degrees Celsius. As they sat outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or walked along the River Nervion, they basked in the sun.
“It generally rains a ton here, it’s freezing and it’s January and it seems like summer,” said Bilbao inhabitant Eusebio Folgeira, 81.
Joana Host, a French tourist, stated: We know that it’s like biking in nice weather, but we also know that the planet is burning. So we’re getting a charge out of it and yet we’re frightened.”
Although the recent warm spell in January fits into the longer-term trend of rising temperatures caused by human-caused climate change, scientists have not yet examined the specific ways in which climate change contributed to the recent high temperatures.
It follows one more year of outrageous climate occasions that researchers closed were straightforwardly connected to worldwide warming, incorporating destructive heatwaves in Europe and India, and flooding in Pakistan.
Dr. Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London, stated, “Human-caused climate change made the record-breaking heat across Europe over the new year more likely to happen, just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter.”
According to Otto, temperature spikes can also cause plants to begin growing earlier in the year, making them more susceptible to being destroyed by frost.
Greenpeace UK stated, “It might be time to completely end our society’s dependence on planet-heating fossil fuels” when millions of people across Europe experience a heatwave in January.
The unusually high temperatures were attributed, according to Meteo France, to a mass of warm air moving toward Europe from subtropical regions.
It struck during the busy skiing season, causing trips to be canceled and the slopes to be empty. Since the Christmas break, resorts in the northern Spanish provinces of Asturias, Leon, and Cantabria have been closed due to a lack of snow.
It ought to have been one of the busiest weeks of the season on Jahorina, which is above Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina and was the location of the 1984 Winter Olympics. The chairlifts, on the other hand, hung lifeless above the grassy slopes. In one guesthouse, the only other guests were a couple who dined alone at the restaurant.
A ski hopping occasion in Zakopane, southern Poland, made arrangements for the few days of Jan. 7-8 was dropped.
After Russia cut fuel deliveries to Europe, European governments have struggled to secure scarce gas supplies and control rising prices. The unusually mild temperatures have provided some short-term relief.
European governments have stated that this energy crisis should accelerate their switch from fossil fuels to clean energy; however, in the short term, falling fuel supplies from Russia have forced them to race to obtain additional gas from other sources.
In many nations, there has been less demand for gas for heating, which has contributed to price drops.
On Wednesday morning, the benchmark front-month gas price was 70.25 euros per megawatt hour, the lowest it had been since February 2022, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
If the milder temperatures help keep gas prices lower, the head of Italy’s energy authority predicted that regulated energy bills would fall this month.
However, governments should not be lulled into complacency or lose their sense of urgency regarding Europe’s energy crisis, according to a Eurointelligence note.
“Resolving Europe’s energy problems will take concerted action over the course of several years,” it stated. “While it will give governments more fiscal breathing room in the first part of this year,” it added. No one ought to accept this is finished at this point.”
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