This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on March 23, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
As Europe closed the books on its warmest year ever recorded, an exceptionally potent winter heat dome descended on much of the continent over the holiday weekend, with thousands of daily and monthly high-temperature records shattered from Spain to Russia.
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“The intensity and extent of warmth in Europe right now is hard to comprehend,” meteorologist Scott Duncantold The Timesof London. “There are too many records to count. Literally thousands. Overnight minimum temperatures are like summer.”
The Timesreported:
The Washington Post notedthat at least seven countries—Belarus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Poland—recorded their warmest January temperatures ever.
Poland’s Institute of Meteorology and Water Management (IMGW)saidSunday that “the average daily temperature for Słubice was 15.3°C for the last day, and 15°C in Warsaw and Wrocław.”
“This means that we have a one-day thermal summer in the middle of winter,” IMGW added. “The thermal anomaly is over 15°C. This is an unprecedented situation in our climate.”
Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who specializes in extreme weather, called the temperatures “totally insane” and “absolute madness.”
It’s “the most extreme event ever seen in European climatology,” Herrera told thePost. “Nothing stands close to this.”
As thePostnoted:
Climatologists said that while weather conditions caused the heat dome currently over Europe, there is a proven link between the continued burning of fossil fuels and rising global temperatures.
“The record-breaking across Europe over the new year was made more likely to happen by human-caused climate change,” Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto toldThe Times, “just as climate change is now making every heatwave more likely and hotter.”
