The last seven years have been the hottest on record, and 2021 ranked fifth, European scientists tracking climate change at the EU’s Copernicus Center have calculated.
“The urgency of combating climate change is now more evident than ever,” said program manager Mario Faccini, presenting the report at a press conference on Monday.
Despite the cool start of the year, 2021 was among the record holders and continued the disturbing tradition of the past decade, the hottest in 125 thousand years.
And warming will continue due to greenhouse gases accumulated in the atmosphere and new emissions, scientists are sure. No matter what humanity does, this trend cannot be reversed in the coming decades — it is only possible to mitigate its consequences, the World Meteorological Organization warned last year.
The Copernicus Center confirmed on Monday that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continued to increase in 2021. Both carbon dioxide and methane have broken records.
Already +1.2 °C
Last year, scientists made a final conclusion: the planet is warming, and man is the undisputed cause of global warming. This conclusion was signed not only by the scientific community, but also by politicians from almost all countries of the world.
They also earlier secured in the Paris Agreement a promise to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to try to keep the global increase in average temperatures within 1.5 ° C compared to the pre-industrial level by the middle of the century.
This ceiling will be breached 10 years earlier, already in 2040, scientists warned. And the next milestone – warming by 2, fraught with catastrophic consequences, will fall before the end of this century, if in the next two decades we continue to smoke the sky and cut down forests at the current pace.
In 2021, according to data released on Monday by the Copernicus Center, the average annual temperature was 1.1-1.2 °C higher than in 1850-1900.
Climate change on the planet threatens humanity, as it is fraught with natural disasters, mass migration, flooded cities and fields, bankruptcy of insurance companies and states. The victims of global warming are already being counted by tens of thousands.
Natural “swing”
The year 2021 once again confirmed the conclusions of scientists that global warming is expressed not in the arrival of cozy warmth to replace the dull chilliness, but in the rocking of the weather “swing” between cold and heat.
This is because the heating of the planet leads to failures in the established cooling system and circulation of water and air. Droughts, frosts, hurricanes, forest fires and floods are becoming more frequent.
In 2021, these “swings” were both geographical and temporary.
Hot Australia has experienced its coolest year in a decade. For the first time in the last five years, there was no drought on the continent. And Europe, on the contrary, was languishing from the heat with a record warm summer-2021.
In general, the first five months of last year were relatively cool for this century on the planet. However, from June to October, temperatures did not fall below the fourth place in the entire history of observations.
Even more interesting things about nature