Experts call for action against climate change at extreme weather congress

In view of climate change, experts called for action at the Extreme Weather Congress in Hamburg. “Each decade since the 1960s has been significantly warmer than the previous one,” said Tobias Fuchs, board member of the German Weather Service (DWD) at the start of the three-day conference in Hamburg with around 1,000 participants. The conference will focus on how climate change influences the occurrence of extreme weather events.

Extreme weather in Germany

According to findings from the German Weather Service, there is an increase in heat waves and droughts in Germany. The heat wave from mid-June was particularly intense. At the end of June, record temperatures of 41.8 degrees were measured east of Magdeburg.

The Robert Koch Institute estimates that around 16,000 people in Germany died as a result of heat this summer. “Progressive climate change increases both the probability and the intensity of such heat waves,” explained Fuchs.

“It is quite possible that in 30 years we will look back on this year, on this period, and find that the summer we currently classify as extreme will be classified as normal despite its temperature records,” said Fuchs, who heads the climate and environmental advice department at the DWD.

Mid-century ice-free Arctic

The polar ice is also continuing to change due to climate change. The Arctic is the fastest warming region in the world. “If this continues, we will be ice-free in the Arctic by the middle of the century,” said the deputy director of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Gesine Mollenhauer.

This has an impact on the ecosystem; fish stocks, for example, migrate north. In the future, it will be easy to operate shipping traffic through the Eastern Arctic, with the resulting geopolitical aspects, Mollenhauer continued.