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The Climate Report 2021 – Unfortunately, record values ​​in many respects

The World Meteorological Organization released its annual climate report. This shows that important indicators unfortunately reached new record levels.

Author: Ralf Nowotny

The global climate system is complex. To unravel this complexity, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) uses seven climate indicators to describe the changing climate and provide a comprehensive overview of climate on a global scale.
These are used to monitor the areas that are most important to climate change. The latest measurement results from the indicators show that in many areas the values ​​rose less than in previous years, but are still reaching record levels.

Four new record values

Four key indicators of climate change – greenhouse gas concentrations , sea level rise , ocean warming and sea acidification – reached new record levels in 2021. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), this is another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary-scale changes on land, oceans and the atmosphere, which are having damaging and long-lasting impacts on sustainable development and ecosystems.

Extreme weather events – the everyday “face” of climate change – resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses and took a heavy toll on people’s lives and well-being.

It is getting warmer

The last seven years have been the warmest seven years on record. The year 2021 was “only” one of the seven warmest because there was a La Niña event at the beginning and end of the year. This resulted in a temporary cooling, but did not reverse the overall trend of rising temperatures.

The global average temperature in 2021 was approximately 1.11 (± 0.13) °C above pre-industrial levels. The world must act within this decade to prevent further worsening climate impacts and limit temperature rise to less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, according to United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.

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The global temperature rise ( source )

The key messages of the climate report

Greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new global high in 2020, as global concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) reached 413.2 parts per million (ppm), or 149% of pre-industrial levels. Data from specific locations suggests that they continued to rise in 2021 and early 2022, with the monthly CO2 average at Mona Loa in Hawaii reaching 416.45 ppm in April 2020, 419.05 ppm in April 2021, and 420.23 in April 2022 ppm reached.

The global annual mean temperature in 2021 was about 1.11 ± 0.13 °C above the pre-industrial average from 1850 to 1900, making it less warm than in some recent years, reflecting cooling from La Niña at the beginning and end of the year. The last seven years, 2015 to 2021, are the seven warmest years on record.

The warming of the oceans was record-breaking. The upper 2,000 meters of the ocean continued to warm in 2021 and is expected to continue to warm in the future - a change that is irreversible on hundred- to thousand-year timescales. All data sets agree that ocean warming rates have increased particularly rapidly over the past two decades. Warming is penetrating deeper and deeper layers. Much of the ocean experienced at least one “severe” marine heat wave in 2021.

Ocean acidification. The ocean absorbs about 23% of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. This reacts with seawater and leads to ocean acidification, which threatens organisms and ecosystem services and thus food security, tourism and coastal protection. As the ocean's pH drops, its ability to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere also decreases. The IPCC concluded that surface pH in the open ocean is very likely to be at its lowest levels in at least 26,000 years, and that current rates of pH change are unprecedented for at least that time.

Global mean sea level reached a new record in 2021, after rising by an average of 4.5 mm per year during 2013-2021. This increase is more than twice as high as between 1993 and 2002 and is mainly due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets. This has significant impacts on hundreds of millions of coastal residents and increases vulnerability to tropical cyclones.

Cryosphere : Although glaciers are melting less in 2020-2021 than in recent years, there is a clear trend of accelerating mass loss on multi-decadal time scales. On average, the world's reference glaciers have shrunk by 33.5 meters (ice equivalent) since 1950, with 76% of this decline occurring since 1980. 2021 was a particularly bad year for glaciers in Canada and the northwestern United States, with record ice mass loss as a result of heatwaves and fires in June and July. Greenland experienced an extraordinary melting event in mid-August and the first rainfall ever recorded at Summit Station, the highest point on the ice sheet at 3,216 m.

Extraordinary heat waves broke records in western North America and the Mediterranean. Death Valley, California, reached 54.4°C on July 9, a similar level to 2020, the highest recorded worldwide since at least the 1930s, and Syracuse, Sicily, reached 48.8°C. The Canadian province of British Columbia reached 49.6°C on June 29, leading to more than 500 reported heat-related deaths and fueling devastating wildfires that in turn worsened the effects of November's floods.

Floods in China's Henan province caused economic losses of $17.7 billion, and Western Europe experienced one of the worst floods on record in mid-July, causing economic losses of over $20 billion in Germany led. There were many deaths.

Drought affected many parts of the world , including the Horn of Africa, Canada, the western United States, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey. In subtropical South America, drought caused major agricultural losses and disrupted energy production and river traffic. The drought in the Horn of Africa has worsened in 2022. In East Africa there is a real risk that there will be a fourth consecutive rain failure and Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia will be hit by a drought unlike anything seen in 40 years. Humanitarian organizations warn of devastating impacts on people and livelihoods in the region.

The ozone hole over Antarctica was unusually large and deep, reaching a maximum area of ​​24.8 million km2 (the size of Africa), due to a strong and stable polar vortex and colder than average conditions in the lower stratosphere.

Food security : The combined impacts of conflict, extreme weather events and economic shocks, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have undermined decades of progress in improving food security worldwide. The worsening humanitarian crises in 2021 have also left more countries at risk of famine. Of the total number of undernourished people in 2020, more than half live in Asia (418 million) and a third in Africa (282 million).

Sources: Four key climate change indicators break records in 2021 , The State of the Global Climate 2021

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Notes:

1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication
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The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual articles (not fact checks) were created using machine help and
were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )


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