Hot, hot, hot for Europe by John Hammond
Tomorrow marks the first day of ‘Green Week 2005’, a week of recognition on climate change across Europe which lasts until June 5th, which is World Environment Day. The week sees leaders coming from round the world to attend conferences and workshops on climate change.
Green week falls at the end of what has been a hot week across Europe, where in London on Friday we saw temperatures rise to a scorching 32C, before typically tailing off into the bank holiday weekend. Even places such as Moscow have seen temperatures soar into the high 80s Fahrenheit last week, where they had power-cuts due to the heat. A report released by the European Environment Agency (EEA) stated that it expects summer to become much warmer across Europe in the coming years.
The detailed report stated that Europe is heating up more quickly than anywhere else in the world, and that cold winters could disappear completely by 2080 due to global warming. The climate of Europe would become much more volatile and the ‘extremes’ would become the norm as we go between drought and floods, hailstorms and hot sunshine. If we take a look back at past extremes, it can give us an idea of what impacts it would have on the people of Europe. There were devastating floods which swept across 11 European countries in 2001, killing 80 people, and heat waves, such as the one of 2003, which killed more than 20,000. In the future the areas highly at risk of severe heat would be the Mediterranean, where temperatures already rocket above 40C (104F) on occasions during the summer.
FACT
A third of the sun’s energy is reflected back into space after hitting Earth’s upper atmosphere, but two thirds gets through, driving Earth’s weather engine.
As you can see from the above statement, most of the suns heat energy penetrates the atmosphere to then reach the surface. As we build up more and more carbon dioxide, one of the heat-trapping greenhouse gases blamed for the warming in the atmosphere, this layer will become thicker and trap more and more of this heat inside the earth’s blanket atmosphere. It’s like having a hot water bottle in the bed and adding another duvet, which would then trap more of that heat inside making it warmer. The warmth from the sun is what drives and controls our weather systems, so the warmer it gets the more energy the sun pays to our weather bank to develop severe storms.
According to the report by the EEA, Europe has heated up by 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years, compared to a global rise of 1.3F. This is evident, in that, 8 out of the 9 glacier regions of Europe were at their lowest level ever.
With the growing number of natural disasters through weather increasing and temperatures on the rise, it is only recently that climate change has been taken seriously. Now, climate change will continue to be a hot topic for the years to come and am sure this will be on the agenda at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, taking place in July.
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