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Eleven out of the 12 hottest years to date have all occurred since 2000, according to a new report by the European Union’s climate monitoring service.

Last year was the hottest year on record for Europe after scorching heatwaves led to record-breaking temperatures in February, June and July, scientists from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (CS3) said in the annual European State of the Climate report.

“The number of days with high heat stress levels are increasing in both northern and southern Europe,” they said.

An intense heatwave at the end of July led to record melting of Greenland’s ice sheet and all-time records being broken in northern Scandinavia, the Copernicus report noted.

According to recent research, Greenland’s ice sheet and the polar ice caps are melting six times faster than they were in the 1990s. The high melt rate fits with the worst-case scenario outlined by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which states that sea levels will rise 17cm without sweeping reductions in greenhouse gas emissions…..

Concentrations of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere continue to increase. “It is only possible to find concentrations as high as they were in 2019 by going back millions of years in history,” the Copernicus scientists said.

Professor Martin Siegert, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London, told The Independent that the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere is “unnaturally high”.

He said it should be 280 parts per million (ppm) but is currently 415ppm and could reach 1000ppm by the end of the century if CO2 emissions continue to rise at their current rate…… https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-global-warming-hottest-years-on-record-a9477796.html