The chair-lift lay lifeless on the grassy slopes of Zahorina above Sarajevo in Bosnia.
London/Brussels:
Record-high winter temperatures swept parts of Europe during the new year, offering short-term relief to governments battling high gas prices and prompting calls from activists for faster action against climate change.
Hundreds of sites from Switzerland to Poland to Hungary have broken temperature records in the past day, with Budapest recording its warmest Christmas Eve ever and climbing to 18.9 °C (66.02 Fahrenheit) on 1 January.
In France, where the night of 30/31 December was the warmest since records began, temperatures in the southwest climbed to around 25 °C on New Year’s Day, while normally bustling European ski resorts were hit by a lack of snow. were deserted.
Czech television reported that some trees had started flowering in private gardens, while Switzerland’s Office of Meteorology and Climatology issued a pollen warning for allergy sufferers from early-blooming hazel plants.
The temperature at Bilbao airport in Spain’s Basque Country reached 25.1 degrees Celsius. 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.
Weather reduced gas tension
The unusually mild temperatures have offered some short-term respite to European governments, which are struggling to secure scarce gas supplies and stem rising prices after Russia cut fuel deliveries to Europe.
European governments have said this energy crisis should accelerate their shift from fossil fuels to clean energy – but in the short term, declining Russian fuel supplies have left them scrambling to get additional gas from elsewhere.
In many countries the demand for gas for heating has fallen, helping to lower prices.
The benchmark front-month gas price was trading at 70.25 euros per megawatt hour on Wednesday morning, the lowest level since February 2022, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The head of Italy’s energy authority predicted that regulated energy bills in the country would fall this month if milder temperatures help keep gas prices down.
However, a note from Eurointelligence cautioned that this should not lull governments into complacency or remove a sense of urgency over Europe’s energy crisis.
“In the first half of this year this will give governments more fiscal breathing space, but concrete action will be taken over the course of several years to solve Europe’s energy problems,” it said. “Nobody should believe it’s over now.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and was auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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