© picture alliance / ROPI | Nardone/Fotogramma
Many countries in Europe are experiencing extremely hot weather. At some point on Wednesday, about 94 million Europeans will be enduring temperatures of 35 degrees and higher.
Most people will experience this in France and Spain, but temperatures are also reaching record highs elsewhere in Europe. Two-thirds of the European population—more than 350 million people—will have to cope with temperatures above 30 degrees on Wednesday, according to the AFP news agency. The figures come from an analysis of forecasts by the German Meteorological Service and population projections for 2025 from the Joint Research Center.
According to Jim Skea, the chair of the IPCC—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—we’d better get used to these extremely hot conditions. “It's inevitable that we will experience even more than what we have experienced in recent days,” said the chair of the group of climate experts working for the United Nations.
"The warming of the hottest days is greater than that of average days. It's increasing by 50 to 100 percent. So if the Earth warms by 2°C, the hottest day of the year could well be 3°C or even 3.5°C warmer,” said Skea.
According to Skea, experts have been predicting these weather conditions for much longer. “The reports I receive from natural scientists show that what we are now observing is at the upper end of the range of possibilities considered by the IPCC,” said the expert. “But I think there’s an important difference: certain phenomena we’re observing on a regional scale, as well as certain indicators that relate more to the oceans than to the atmosphere, show that we’ve crossed this threshold of what’s possible.”
Picture: © picture alliance / ROPI | Nardone/Fotogramma