Europe's climate (click here) is warming much faster than the rest of the world and scientists are trying to understand why.
The world is nowhere near on track to limiting the global temperature rise to the 1.5 degrees Celsius required by the Paris Agreement, the international treaty negotiated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris in 2015. In fact, latest predictions show that globally, the climate is set to get on average 2.4 degrees C warmer compared to the pre-industrial era, unless emissions of greenhouse gases are drastically cut.
But not all parts of the world are set to be hit equally. Europe, in fact, has already passed the 1.5-degree C threshold and is currently 2.2 degrees C warmer than it was before the industrial revolution, Samantha Burgess, deputy director for climate change services at the European Earth observation program Copernicus, said Tuesday (Nov. 2) in a briefing at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) that is concluding this week in Glasgow, Scotland.
