Another significant fact of climate change in Belgium: the multiplication of heat waves. “Until the 1980s, there was about one heat wave every four years. Since 1982, we have had twenty heat waves. Today, there is a heat wave two out of three years. And it will continue to grow over the next few years.“ underlines Pascal Mormal.
The latter defines a heat wave as any meteorological episode accumulating at least five consecutive days at more than 25°C and at least three days at more than 30°C.
Direct consequence of these unprecedented waves of heat wave: the explosion of heat records.
“The absolute temperature record to date is 39.7°C recorded on July 25, 2019 (note: it was exceeded on July 19). It smashed the previous record which dated from June 1947 and which was 36.8°C. We are now seeing more and more temperatures close to or above 40°C, which seemed to be an insurmountable threshold ten or fifteen years ago.” advance Pascal Mormal.
For the meteorologist, as for the rest of the scientific community, however, these records cannot be understood in isolation. As such, thehe National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) recommends making a clear distinction between climate and weather.
Several of its researchers thus explain thata rise of five degrees in one day”nothing serious“. In contrast, “a five-degree rise in the Earth’s average temperature variation corresponds to the warming that brought Europe out of the last ice age 20,000 years ago“.
It is therefore not the value of the temperatures as such that is “worrying” but their evolution, and their multiplication, according to the meteorologist at the IRM. “There was a real tipping point at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s: we really entered an almost continuous period of lasting warming of temperatures“.