2022 was another year of disastrous and deadly weather and climate extremes around the world, fueled in part by human-caused climate change, the United Nations weather agency said Friday.
Droughts, floods and heat waves affected people on every continent and cost many billions of dollars, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said in its new report “The State of the Global Climate 2022.” Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record, ocean heat and acidity levels reached record heights and the melting of some European glaciers was, literally, off the charts, the WMO said.
“While greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and the climate continues to change, populations worldwide continue to be gravely impacted by extreme weather and climate events,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a news release.
Taalas said that current glacier melting and sea-level rise show “we have already lost” on those two key signals of the planet’s health.
How does climate change affect you?: Subscribe to the weekly Climate Point newsletter
READ MORE: Latest climate change news from USA TODAY
Eight warmest years on record
For global temperature, the years 2015-2022 were the eight warmest on record despite the cooling impact of a La Niña event for the past three years.
LA NINA:La Nina, which worsens hurricanes and drought, is gone after 3 years
Specifically, in 2022, the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand all had their hottest years on record.
Global heat and other weather records go back to 1850.
In addition, the melting of glaciers and sea level rise – which again reached record levels in 2022 – will continue to up to thousands of years, according to the report.
And while levels have been higher before human civilization began, the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane in the Earth’s atmosphere reached their highest modern recorded amounts.
For melting glaciers and sea-level rise, ‘we have already lost’
The impacts of climate change were felt worldwide last year. “In 2022, continuous drought in East Africa, record breaking rainfall in Pakistan and record-breaking heat waves in China and Europe affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage,” said Taalas.
The key glaciers that scientists use as a health check for the world shrank by more than four feet in just one year and for the first time in history no snow survived the summer melt season on Switzerland’s glaciers, the report said.
“Unfortunately these negative trends in weather patterns and all of these parameters may continue until the 2060s” despite efforts to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases, because of the pollution already spewed, Taalas said. “We have already lost this melting of this glaciers game and sea-level rise game. So that’s bad news.”
Earth Day:On Earth Day, scientists tell us what 2050 could be like. Their answers might surprise you.
Ice sheets losing ice
More bad climate news came out Thursday: A separate report found the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are now losing more than three times as much ice a year as they were 30 years ago.
The new figures “are pretty disastrous really,” said study co-author Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute.
“This is a devastating trajectory,” said U.S. National Snow and Ice Center Deputy Lead Scientist Twila Moon, who wasn’t part of the study. “These rates of ice loss are unprecedented during modern civilization.”
Since 1992, Earth has lost 8.3 trillion tons of ice from the two ice sheets, the study found. That’s enough to flood the entire United States with 33.6 inches of water.
Contributing: The Associated Press
