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In the last thirty years, temperatures have not risen anywhere else as much as here. Specifically, this means that Europe has warmed by an average of about 0.048 degrees Celsius every year since 1993. This is shown by data from the Berkeley Earth Research Institute. What doesn't seem like much at first glance, actually amounts to 1.45 degrees of warming over 30 years. The World Meteorological Organization and the EU's climate change service Copernicus reached the same conclusion in the report "The State of the Climate in Europe 2022". But why is Europe warming so fast? The reasons are different, say the three scientists with whom ZDFheute spoke.
Clean air leads to more heat
In the 20th century Europe, among other things, there was not much emphasis on clean air: factories and coal-fired power plants fueled the economic miracle in Germany and beyond. Until the early 1980s, a lot of sulfur was emitted, says Andreas Fink, a climate researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Sulfur aerosols reflected sunlight and thus cooled the earth, so to speak. "After more and more desulphurization systems were installed in power plants, this cooling effect ceased to exist around the 1990s," explains Fink. This event is also known as "Global Dimming - Global Brightening". (Moritz Zajonz).
