A year of highs and lows, but just how exceptional was our climate in 2022?

From Ireland to Croatia, and from the Arctic to the Mediterranean sea, Europe saw examples of extreme weather in 2022 and experts are warning this could be the new normal.

Climatologist Valerie Masson-Delmotte of Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'environnement, said France saw unusually dry conditions in Brittany, but that was just one example of change.

“And then a climate where you can see, for example, in the south-west of France wildfires that were incredibly difficult to contain such as had been seen before in Portugal," she said. “So, for me, that was no surprise, but at the same time so sad to see, and also frankly the fact that the knowledge was available to show that this type of event is going to become more intense but that our societies are not ready for them.”

She added: “The Summer of 2022, for me, truly saw the materialisation of a new climate.”

And, perhaps not surprisingly, 2022 was the warmest year on record for many European countries.

Glaciologists are concerned with the impact these changes are having on Europe’s traditionally colder areas. They say the 2021-22 winter season was very dry especially on the southern side of the Alps, with almost no precipitation between December and March, leaving glaciers exposed to the warmer elements in the spring and summer.

“Low snowfall means that we had a very thin snow cover on the glaciers at the end of winter,” said Dr Matthius Huss, Climatologist, ETH, Zurich. “And this is, of course, a very bad start going into the melting season.”

Dr Huss says the Swiss Alps lost 6% of their total remaining ice volume as a result.

“We had a combination of very little snow during winter time and then very high temperatures during the summertime, so continuous heat waves.