Climate Change Not Felt Equally Throughout Europe: A Study

Climate change is not equally felt throughout Europe, a study published in the journal Environmental Research Letters shows.

Comprised of researchers from the London School of Economics and the University of Warwick, the team translated weather observations into climate change observations using a gridded dataset going back 60 years.

In doing so, they discovered that the hottest 5 percent of summer days warmed fastest in a stretch of territory from southern England and northern France to Denmark. In regions further south in France and Germany, in contrast, the average and slightly hotter than average days warmed most. Meanwhile, eastern Spain and Italy underwent a warming of all types of days, though most regions that are cooler than average warmed little, the researchers found.

These findings, the authors explain, highlight the difference between global and local climate change.

"Climate is fundamentally the distributions of weather," David Stainforth, the lead author on the paper, said in a statement. "As climate changes, the distributions change. But they don't just shift, they change shape. How they change shape depends on where you are. In Britain, climate change will feel very different if you live in Northumbria to if you live in Oxfordshire; different again in Devon."

For this reason, Strainforth explains, the current international goal of limiting increases in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius would ultimately mean greater changes for some regions of the world than others, resulting in an uneven distribution of burden across nations, communities and industries.

Other disparities the researchers mapped included little change in Spain and much of Italy in winter nighttime temperatures even as the frequency of nights that fell below zero decreased decreased substantially in the UK's northeastern region.

"It is common to discuss climate change in terms of changes in global average temperatures but these can be far from people's perceptions of climate change," co-author Sandra Chapman said. "The results in this paper begin to provide a picture of how local climate has been changing across Europe. It is a picture which is closer to that experienced by individuals."