Clemente Álvarez
This week the European Environment Agency has insisted that the European continent is the fastest warming by climate change, twice as much as the average of the Earth. However, if you are looking for Google, you will find many alerts from other sites that are also warming up faster than the rest: the Arctic, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, China, Australia, Canada, Mexico, the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Antarctica … This generates confusion and does not give much credibility to the climatic warning. According to the American statistic William M. Briggs, “anywhere on Earth is heating faster than any other place on earth.” Thus, it is worth asking: what’s true of all this?
The reality is that, scientifically, it does fits that in all these sites the increase in temperature is greater than the average. It occurs because these are land areas on a planet occupied in more than 70% of its surface by oceans. As María José Sanz, scientific director of Basque Center for Climate Change (BC3) explains, “the water masses are heated much more slowly than the terrestrial areas, then, it is obvious that the earth’s surface is heated faster”.
This explains the multiplication of notices in land areas on the highest rate of heating than the average of the planet, however, there are also differences between all these sites. And, if we talk about continents, indeed, Europe is the one that is heating more quickly. As Sanz affects, also a member of the Table of the Intergovernmental Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC), one of the factors that most influence is the so -called “Albedo”, which determines the proportion of radiation that reflects a surface. In places covered by ice or snow, most of the radiation that reaches the surface is reflected. On the other hand, in other areas (darker) where this does not happen the heat that comes is absorbed by the Earth, increasing temperatures. “Europe is in the northern hemisphere, and the closer to the North Pole, the Arctic, the more warming, because there are more changes with the Albedo. In high latitudes in which you had more surfaces covered by snow or ice, when they disappear these changes the albedo and they heat more quickly than it was heated before,” says the researcher.
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