Temperatures hit 25.1C at Bilbao airport in Spain’s Basque Country. People enjoy the sunshine while sitting outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao or strolling along the Nervion River.
“It always rains a lot here, it’s very cold and it’s January and it feels like summer,” said 81-year-old Bilbao resident Eusebio Folgueira.
French tourist Joanna Hoste said: “It’s like good weather for biking but we know it’s like the planet is burning. So we’re enjoying it but at the same time we’re scared.”
Scientists have not yet analyzed the specific ways in which climate change has affected recent high temperatures, but January’s warm weather fits a long-term trend of rising temperatures due to human-caused climate change.
It follows another year of extreme weather events that scientists concluded were directly linked to global warming, including deadly heatwaves in Europe and India and flooding in Pakistan.
Dr Friedrich Otto, climate scientist at Imperial College, said: “The record-breaking heat across Europe in the new year was more likely to be caused by human-caused climate change, just as climate change is now making each heat wave more likely and hotter. ” London.
Otto said that due to the increase in temperature, plants start growing earlier in the year, which puts them at risk of frost death.
free slope
Greenpeace UK said, “When millions of people across Europe are facing a heat wave in January, it may be time to completely end our society’s reliance on planet-warming fossil fuels.”
The French national weather agency Meteo France attributed the anomalous temperatures to a mass of warm air moving towards Europe from subtropical regions.
It struck during the busy skiing season, causing cancellations of trips and emptying of the slopes. Resorts in the northern Spanish regions of Asturias, León and Cantabria have been closed since the Christmas holidays due to a lack of snow.
On Jahorina above Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, home of the 1984 Winter Olympics, it should have been one of the busiest weeks of the season. Instead, the chair-lift hung lifeless over the grassy slopes. A couple in a guesthouse had dinner alone in the restaurant, guests only.
A ski jumping event in Zakopane in southern Poland, scheduled for the weekend of 7–8 January, was cancelled.