The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has predicted that global temperatures will reach record levels over the next five years and cross the 1.5°C threshold for the first time. It also warned that humanity was entering an “uncharted territory” that would affect our health, food security, water supplies and the environment.
Highlights
- In its annual report, the United Nations Meteorological Agency warned that there is a 66% chance that global temperatures will exceed the critical threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels at least once by 2027.
- If these predictions come true, it will be the first time humanity has crossed the 1.5°C threshold.
- It is also the first time the agency has found that warming is likely to exceed this threshold, having last year projected equal probabilities for the years 2022 to 2026.
- Experts believe that limiting global warming to 1.5°C can help avert the worst effects of climate change and most countries around the world pledged to pursue this goal when they signed the landmark Paris Climate Change Agreement.
- OMM Secretary General, Petteri Taalas, stressed that the fact that a minimum has been reached or exceeded in one year or more does not mean that the limit set in Paris – which indicates a temperature rise on a longer time scale – has been definitively exceeded. That the agency is “sounding the alarm” that we will cross the threshold temporarily and “more and more.”
- According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the risks of temporarily exceeding the 1.5°C limit have been increasing since 2015, rising from almost zero to around 10% between 2017 and 2021.
to monitor
According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report, the next few years will almost certainly be among the warmest on record. Specifically, there is a 98% chance that one of the next five years will be the hottest on record, and 98% that the average temperature over the entire five-year period will be higher than the average of the previous five years. In January, the World Meteorological Organization said the past eight years were the warmest on record, driven by human activities that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and trap heat. Recent years have been marked by extreme weather events, droughts, fires, floods, record heat waves and other issues related to global warming. Although many records have been broken, recent years have benefited from the cooling effect of the La Niña weather phenomenon. The emergence of El Niño, another global weather phenomenon characterized by warmer weather, will be a major contributing factor to higher temperatures in the coming years, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
Important quote
“Mean global temperatures are expected to continue to rise” and take us “further and further away from the climate we are used to,” said Leon Hermanson, a UK Met Office scientist who led the report.
Translated article from the American magazine Forbes – Author: Robert Hart
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