Forecast for the climate summit: 2021 will be one of the seven most intense heat years

Forecast for the climate summit
2021 is one of the seven most intense heat years

At the start of the climate summit in Glasgow, the World Weather Organization publishes its forecast for 2021: Even without a heat record, it is one of the seven hottest years in the recent past. In many parts of the world, people struggled with drought and forest fires.

According to preliminary measurements, the year 2021 was not quite as hot as the past three years, but that does not change the long-term trend of significant warming. The year is likely to be one of the seven warmest in recent history, all since 2015, reported the World Weather Organization (WMO) at the start of the World Climate Conference in Glasgow. This year, the La Niña weather phenomenon, which occurs every few years, initially had a cooling effect.

Based on the measurements up to the end of September, the WMO is assuming a global average temperature of 1.09 degrees above the level from 1850 to 1900 this year. The warmest year so far was 2016, with plus 1.2 degrees. 2019 and 2020 were also in the order of magnitude. However, the differences between the three years were so minimal that a ranking is not possible. The WMO always calculates an average of the data from measuring stations around the world.

The consequences of climate change, which is contributing to more frequent and more extreme weather events, were felt in many places: for the first time since records began, it rained instead of snowed at the highest point of the Greenland ice sheet. In the western United States and Canada, a heat wave brought temperatures that were up to six degrees above previous records in some cases. Tunisia, Sicily, Spain and Turkey reported heat records around the Mediterranean. There were also devastating forest fires. In China and Europe – for example in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate – there were heavy rains and floods. South America experienced severe drought for the second year in a row.

Sea ice extent in July lower than ever

Sea level rise has been accelerating since 2013, according to the report, and has hit a new high this year. Between 1993 and 2002 the annual increase was 2.1 millimeters, between 2013 and 2021 4.4 millimeters. The rise in sea levels is due to melting ice and the expansion of salt water due to warming. In the Arctic, the extent of the sea ice in early July was lower than ever since it was measured. The warm, dry summer of 2021 in western North America resulted in massive glacier ice losses. The mass shrank from 2015 to 2019 almost twice as fast as it did from 2000 to 2004.

In the Laptev Sea and the Beaufort Sea on the Arctic Ocean, there were strong to extreme marine heat waves from January to April. In addition, the seas are acidifying. The surface pH value of the open oceans is now as low as it has been for at least 26,000 years, according to the WMO. This reduces the ability of the oceans to store climate-damaging CO2. According to estimates, the oceans have so far absorbed 23 percent of the annual man-made CO2 emissions. The WMO refers to the devastating consequences: Droughts and floods cause millions of people to lose their crops and thus their livelihoods. The number of starving people is increasing. Millions of people are being displaced from inhospitable areas.

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