Asia had the second hottest year on record. On April 30, temperatures hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Jacobabad, Pakistan—unusually early for the region. When summer comes, the heat wave may have killed 50,000 people in the European Union only in July, and as the vegetation withered, fires broke out across London and burning wide swaths of France, Spain and other European countries. Drought has crippled Europe, the western United States and China, endangering food supplies as well crops reach their thermal limitrisk of deficiency staple grains and vegetablesand push the price up for as luxurious as wine.
“The UK had the warmest year on record and Western Europe the warmest summer on record. “Not everywhere, not every year, but almost constantly, these records are being broken around the world,” Schmidt said. “We have 40 degrees C [104 degrees Fahrenheit] temperature in the south of the UK. It never happened, and they were completely unprepared.”
Courtesy of Earth Berkeley
You can see these ridiculous temperatures in the map above from another 2022 global temperature report released today by the nonprofit research group Berkeley Earth, agreeing that this is the fifth hottest year on record. By their calculations, by 2022, nearly 90% of the planet’s surface will be significantly warmer than the average temperature from 1951 to 1980.
Notice how the cool La Niña strip is blue off the coast of South America, and vice versa, how the Middle East, Asia, and Europe are red. Zeke Hausfather, a research scientist at Berkeley Earth, said: “There are about 380 million people living in areas with the hottest absolute temperatures on record this year. “While you can have a lot of variation from year to year due to ocean dynamics in the Pacific, in the long run the anthropogenic warming signal is pretty clear.”
The map shows red extending to the North Pole, showing higher temperatures in the region that is currently warming four and a half times faster than the global average, as scientists announced this summer. That is called Arctic amplification: As the ice melts more, it exposes the darker land below, which absorbs more solar energy, thus increasing the temperature. You can see how this got out of control in the chart below, which is also from the Berkeley Earth report.
