2019_12_16_ICS_gil_alana

In July 2019 an unprecedented heat wave broke all thermometers in much of Europe. Paris recorded 42.6°C, Belgium reached 41.8°C and Germany 41.5°C, while in the Netherlands the thermometer also topped forty, with 40.7°C. Climate change makes heat waves like the one experienced last summer up to a hundred times more likely. 

Despite the popularization of the phenomenon today and the increasing number of measures to combat it, climate change has been dragging on for centuries. Two new publications by Luis Alberiko Gil-Alaña, researcher of the Navarra Center for International Development at the University of Navarra, have shown that the rise in temperatures can be traced back to 16,000 years ago. Institute for Culture and Society of the University of Navarra, have shown that the rise in temperatures can be traced back to 1665. Since that date the thermometer has not stopped rising in Europe with a average of 0.2°C every hundred years. 

In the first research, published in the scientific journal Climate Research, this increase has increased especially since 2010, when the records show a average greater increase that threatens to further warm the Old Continent.

The second research, published in the scientific journal Climatic Change, analyzes the temperatures of up to 29 climate stations in twelve European countries. A clear difference between the south and north of the continent is sample at work . Despite sudden heat waves across the continent, the largest prolonged temperature increases are experienced in the south, with the largest increases recorded in Florence and Verona followed by Strasbourg and Toulouse.

The rise in temperatures in Europe is, therefore, a long-standing phenomenon since 1655, but more pronounced in the last decade than ever before and more pronounced in the south, where temperatures are rising above the European average .