Will the summer of 2022 remain the "coolest" of those that await us in the future?
The impact of climate change will cause increasingly hot and unbearable summers, with extreme heat waves from exceptional to ordinary.
L'estate that we are living in Italy and in other Western European countries it is undoubtedly among the hottest e dry ever since the historical records of temperature. Just think that after the shattered primates in various areas of Spain he was born in Portugal with peaks up to 47°C except for today I 40 °C in the south of England, 15 °C above the average for the period.
A threshold never reached before. A "fire" also the France con I 42,7°C in Beaulieu-sur-Layon and 42,4°C in Cazaux registered on 18 July. The reason for these anomalous temperatures lies in the presence of African anticyclone (high-pressure hot air mass coming from the south) that has undermined the Azores anticyclone from our summers, a phenomenon linked both to natural factors - such as the weakening of the jet streams - that due to factors of anthropogenic origin, fundamentally the carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, which catalyze I climate changes and upset the atmospheric balance.
The question that everyone is asking themselves in the face of this unbearable heat is whether this summer will be the coolest of those that await us in the future, in light of the dramatic incremental impact of global warming. In other words, will all future summers be worse than this one?
To answer this question we can draw a parallel with the summer of 2003, to date the hottest ever. As specified in a press release published on Facebook by the Geophysical Observatory of Unimore (the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia), "summer 2022 is very similar to summer 2003, so much so that the current season is one of the events that never had occurred since the observatory observations began ”.
The scientific institute adds that “it compares the early summer of 2022, which began in May, to the summer of 2003, the heat of which was defined as 'Hyperestremo'. At the moment the average temperatures are second only to that of summer, while the rainfall is lower than in 2003, but last year and in other years the drought was even worse ”. In simple terms, we are facing an exceptional phenomenon and at the moment we absolutely cannot say whether this anomalous heat, "hyperestremo".
In fact, it will come again next year and so on. It is indeed essential not to confuse the extreme maximum peaks with the increase of temperature media caused by climate change. The phenomena are undoubtedly interconnected, but this does not mean that summer after summer we would always have a higher heat than that experienced the previous summer.
To give an example, the Unimore Geophysical Observatory specified that in June 2022 the average temperature in Modena was 26.5 ° C, 2.9 ° C higher than the reference average (1991 - 2020), but in 2003 the average temperature was 27.5 ° C. To date we do not even know if the scorching summer we are experiencing will be the hottest ever; it will certainly be among the hottest, but 2003 could still hold the "scepter", precisely in light of the fact that we are facing exceptional heat waves.
The more serious problem is that what is now extraordinary could become the norm in a few decades, precisely because of climate change. As shown by a climate model developed by the Californian non-profit organization "Berkeley Earth", Italy in 2020 reached i 2° C in more average temperature than in the pre-industrial era. The projection provides that in 2100 this average temperature will be well 4,6° C above. This means that we will have significantly hotter summers as the years go by.
And the oversized mercury is just one of the many dramas triggered by global warming; give her famines ai catastrophic fires passing through sea level rise capable of sinking entire coastal regions under water, the spread of diseases, extreme drought and so much more.
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In another post, the Unimore Geophysical Observatory specified that we are entering "the statistically hottest period of the year", but at the moment "it does not seem like a wave capable of beating the historical record of 29 July 1983, 38.5 ° C ", With reference to the situation in Modena. The trend, however, "looks a lot like summer 2003".
To date, the experts of the University of Emilia specify, 34 days have been counted with maximum temperatures of at least 30 ° C, "a breath from 2003 which as today was at 35". So let's expect increasingly hot summers in the future, but at the moment we certainly cannot say that the one of 2022 will remain the freshest for the rest of our lives, precisely in light of its exceptional nature (in a trend that is absolutely negative and worrying).
