Perhaps in the exact place where you live it was not like this or you had a different perception, but if you have spent the last few weeks in Northern Italy this figure will hardly surprise you: spring 2021 so far, in Italy and also in the rest of Europe, is was the coldest, or rather the least hot for at least 18 years now. And the fault, even if it seems counterintuitive, lies precisely with global warming, which therefore, as scientists often explain, does not only produce the anomalous heat waves to which we are getting used to in the summer, or relatively mild winters. The data can be deduced by cross-referencing some rigorously official and objective findings. In April, the latest available in full, tracking done since European Copernicus programme certified that “Across Europe, April 2021 was the coldest month compared to the same period each year since 2003”.
The "cold" peaks, often accompanied by bad weather like the one we are still seeing in the North these days, at the end of the month of May, were recorded according to experts precisely in France, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, where to understand the phenomenon can help us further data collected by Terna, the company that manages the national electricity grid and which "adjusts" the electricity consumption data also considering the average monthly temperatures. In the case of March, throughout the Italian territory the average temperature was 1 °C lower than that of March 2020, which in turn was already 1,2 degrees lower than in the same month of 2019. Even more marked the anomaly in the month of April: in Italy the average temperature was 1,5°C lower compared to April 2020, which was in line with that of 2019. It should also be remembered that the spring of 2019 was in turn not a particularly hot spring, indeed the third "coldest" since 2013.
The month of May remains to be seen, but the sensation, recalling the weather of the last few weeks, is that the general trend will not have time to change, even if the forecasts indicate the arrival of the first big heat in the last week of the month. Many will wonder: but why, if the last springs are really so cold (and in the case of 2020 in Italy also a good part of the summer, especially in the North), every year the heat record is reached globally? The answer is simple: because the temperatures of the entire planet throughout the year contribute to forming that figure, and what happens in Italy and in Europe could be different in other continents. Indeed it is, given that the Copernicus program also found that "globally, April 2021 was warmer than any April prior to 2010", even if "colder than April in 2010 and the months of April in the period from 2016 to 2020”.
It's not all. 2020 was the hottest year ever, but the huge fires that broke out in Australia, in parts of the Amazon region and in the western United States contributed to the final figure - all the experts say - in no small way. Also, according to the study Upper Ocean Temperatures Hit Record High in 2020, in which the Italian researchers of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv) and Enea also participate, 2020 was the year of the record also with regard to the temperature of the oceans. And the warmest oceans oceans lead to increased warming of the atmosphere, not to mention that a warmer atmosphere causes more intense rains, a greater number of storms and hurricanes, moreover of greater intensity, also increasing the risk of floods.
