Austria faces up to five degrees more by 2100

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once again warns of the devastating effects of unchecked climate change.
The extent to which global warming has also reached Austria is shown by the comprehensive statistics of the ZAMG. According to these statistics, the temperature in Austria has risen by around two degrees since the beginning of industrialization. If the trend is not reversed, the warming will be at least five degrees by the year 2100.

The extent to which these two degrees are already having an impact in Austria can be seen clearly from the number of hot days with temperatures of at least 30 degrees. In the period 1961 to 1990, for example, there were between five and eleven heat days per year in most of Austria’s provincial capitals, and the record values were 20 days. In the period from 1991 to 2020, the ZAMG already recorded between 16 and 22 heat days and the records were already over 40.

Health risk from increasing heat
“This could continue: The current extreme value of 40 heat days per year in Austria will be the normal case at the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue unchecked worldwide,” the Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics said in a statement. The records would then be “in a currently still completely unimaginable range of 60 to 80 days above 30 degrees per year.”

Particularly in summer, the distribution of daily rainfall also changed in recent decades: The number of days with little rain became rarer. By contrast, days with a lot of precipitation became ten to 30 percent more frequent over the past 30 years. “This leads to the seemingly paradoxical fact that in summer both dry phases and heavy rain events became more intense and more frequent,” ZAMG said.

The increasing heat also brings enormous risks for health: “Heat is still underestimated as a danger, because it is often difficult to prove that a death from, for example, cardiovascular failure was caused by a heat wave. However, numerous studies show that significantly more people in Europe die from heat waves than from storms, floods, or other weather extremes,” ZAMG says.

Climate change also affects vegetation
In Austria, for example, there is no trend toward less precipitation, but the risk of droughts is nevertheless increasing. This is because the steady warming is having a strong impact on the water balance: The warmer it is, the more moisture evaporates from the soils into the air.

In addition, a warmer climate lengthens the growing season and plants take water from the soil over a longer period of time. Furthermore, studies for the Alpine region show that in the coming decades the fluctuations in precipitation could become greater from year to year, which would further increase the risk of drought.

Climate change also has an enormous impact on snowfall. According to ZAMG forecasts, in the coming decades it will only remain cold enough for snowfall above about 1,500 to 2,000 meters. At lower elevations, it will rain more and more often instead. In Austria, for example, the number of days with a snow cover in Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz has decreased by about 30 percent over the past 90 years or so. If greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated worldwide, the duration of snow cover will decrease by about 90 percent by the year 2100 at elevations below about 400 meters above sea level, and by slightly more than 50 percent at elevations around 1,500 meters.

However, ZAMG also emphasized that the devastating future forecasts do not have to come true if countermeasures are taken. If the Paris climate target is met, warming in Austria and worldwide could level off just above current levels in the coming decades. “It is important to us as the national meteorological service to provide as detailed as possible the latest findings on the past and future of the climate in Austria, so that a factual discussion can take place on the current state of research and decisions can be made on important long-term measures,” said Marc Olefs, head of climate research at ZAMG. “An important result of the research is that with ambitious climate protection it is still possible to dampen the negative effects of climate change.”