Petteri Taalas

More temperature records were expected to tumble on Tuesday as Europe awaited the peak of a punishing heatwave and wildfires scorched swathes of the Northern Hemisphere, forcing the evacuation of 1,200 children close to a Greek seaside resort.

Summer has just begun in the Northern Hemisphere but a brutal heat wave is already gripping parts of Europe, China and the United States, where record temperatures expected this weekend are a stark illustration of the dangers of a warming climate.

World governments must prepare for even more extreme weather and record temperatures in the coming months. This was warned by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations agency for weather, climate and water resources, declaring the beginning of the warming phenomenon known as El Niño.

Earth's protective ozone layer is slowly but noticeably healing at a pace that would fully mend the hole over Antarctica in about 43 years, a new United Nations report says.

Asia suffered its hottest year on record in 2020, the United Nations said on Oct. 26 ahead of the COP26 summit, with extreme weather taking a heavy toll on the continent's development.

In its annual "State of the Climate in Asia" report, the UN's World Meteorological Organization said every part of the region had been affected.

Weather disasters are striking the world four to five times more often and causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s, the United Nations weather agency reports.

This year is on course to be one of the three warmest ever recorded, the United Nations said on Dec. 2, as the UN chief warned the world was on the brink of "climate catastrophe".

Cyprus has a role to play in issues concerning climate change by building up a new station to monitor the effects, General Secretary of the World Meteorological Organisation, Petteri Taalas told CNA.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Thanks to a combination of human activities and the El Nino weather event, last year’s increase was 50% higher than the yearly average from the past decade, driving CO2 to a level that’s not been seen for 800,000 years.

The year 2016 will "very likely" be the hottest on record, the U.N. said Nov. 14, warning of calamitous consequences if the march of global warming cannot be halted.