Man-made climate change: Climate researcher: Europe will experience more frequent weather extremes

Europe is warming at an accelerated rate, making it the continent most susceptible to increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events, according to climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf. He warns that the current global warming of 1.4 degrees Celsius is already leading to significant extremes, and future warming will only intensify these conditions.

“

Where the warming is particularly strong, there are also stronger extremes. Their frequency increases with warming.

Rahmstorf, affiliated with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), explained that events once occurring every 500 years could now happen roughly every 50 years. He cautioned that the extreme heat, drought, low river levels, and wildfires experienced this summer are not a peak but a precursor to worsening conditions. The scientist highlighted that the combination of long-term climate warming and natural weather fluctuations creates these extreme summers.

“

Such drastic events, which already result from the current global warming of 1.4 degrees, we have not yet experienced at all. Let alone for an even warmer climate that we will have in the coming decades.

"The climate change continues: we will experience such heat summers more often as long as we do not reduce emissions to zero," Rahmstorf stated in an interview with 'Rheinische Post'. He clarified that achieving climate neutrality does not mean conditions will improve but rather that they will stop deteriorating. As long as greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) are emitted, the atmosphere will continue to heat up.

“

It will not stay that way, but will get worse.