(ANSA-AFP) - BELGRADE, 04 GEN - Serbia recorded its hottest
year in history in 2024, the Balkan country's meteorological
office said this week.
The average surface air temperature last year was 13.3
degrees Celsius (56 degrees Fahrenheit), "which is 2.3C higher
than the average for the period 1991-2020 and almost 1.0C more
that the previously hottest year -- 2023," the State
Hydro-Meteorological Service said in a report on Friday.
Globally, the United Nations' climate and weather agency has
said 2024 is set to be the warmest ever seen across the planet,
capping a decade of unprecedented heat fuelled by human
activity. UN leaders and climate scientists blame global heating
for a string of calamitous floods, fires, heatwaves and
hurricanes across the world in 2024. Serbia was not spared,
enduring a series of heatwaves in June, July and August.
The Serbian met office reported a record number of days when
temperatures topped 35C, the highest ever number of tropical
nights and the smallest ever number of frosty and icy days.
Physicist Irina Lazic said Serbia had been more like the
Mediterranean than the Balkans last year. "The temperature range
in 2024 was typical for the coastal regions of Spain, Italy or
Greece in the period 1961-1990," Lazic, a member of the Physics
Faculty in Belgrade wrote for climate website Klima 101. In a
sign of accelerating global heating, the met office report said
all of the 10 hottest years in Serbian history had occurred
since the year 2000. Of the hottest 20, all had been in the 21st
century except two, 1994 and 1951. The town of Negotin in
eastern Serbia, known for its very cold winters, witnessed its
lowest ever snowfall in 2024, just two centimetres deep. Several
weather stations reported their fewest ever days of snow cover.
The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to
well below 2.0C above pre-industrial levels -- and to 1.5C if
possible. Last year the average global temperature was 1.45C
hotter than before the industrial revolution, when humans
started burning large amounts of fossil fuels. The UN's World
Meteorological Organization is set to publish the consolidated
global temperature figure for 2024 in January. (ANSA-AFP).
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