It has been a common refrain since the December 2015 Paris Climate Agreement: “We need to do everything we can to keep global warming below 1.5° Celsius.” For a number of years, experts on climate change have cautioned that the world was in risk of surpassing that goal and that countries were not taking all necessary steps to keep average global temperatures from rising above that point.
The Earth experienced a year-long period of 1.64°C temperature increases over pre-industrial levels, with average global temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 being the hottest on record, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service. The service’s director, Carlo Buontempo, told ‘The Guardian’ that the data’s analysis showed a “large and continuing shift” in the environment as global warming picks up speed rather than a statistical anomaly. “As the climate continues to warm, we will undoubtedly witness new records being broken, even if this particular series of extremes stops eventually. If we don’t stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans, this will happen eventually.
Key climate indicators are tracked by Copernicus, a scientific organisation that is part of the European Union’s space programme. Copernicus uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft, and weather stations to track key climate metrics. It was discovered that June 2024 was the hottest June ever recorded and the twelfth consecutive month with temperatures 1.5°C above the average between 1850 and 1900. The authors noted that while temperatures in some months showed “relatively small margins” above 1.5° C, other climate organisations’ datasets might not support the 12-month trend of global warming.
“This is not good news at all,” said Aditi Mukherji, a director at research institute CGIAR and co-author of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. “We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming — and at 1.5C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year.” Some ecosystems are more vulnerable than others. In its latest review of the science, the IPCC found that 1.5° C of warming will kill off 70 to 90% of tropical coral reefs, while warming of 2° C will wipe them out almost entirely.
According to a survey conducted this year by The Guardian among hundreds of IPCC authors, 75% of the scientists predicted that global warming will rise by at least 2.5°C by 2100, with nearly half predicting temperatures to rise by more than 3°C. Although the differences may seem insignificant, they could spell the difference between “semi-dystopian” futures and widespread human suffering. Mukherji likened a moderate fever to 1°C global warming, and a medium-to-high-grade fever to 1.5°C warming. Consider a human body that has been at that temperature for years. Can the person ever again operate normally? That’s how the Earth system is right now, she continued. “A crisis has occurred.”
François Gemenne, an IPCC author and director of the Hugo Observatory at the University of Liège, said global warming is not a binary issue. “It is not 1.5° C or death. Every 0.1° C matters a great deal because we’re talking about global average temperatures, which translate into massive temperature gaps locally.” Even in a best-case scenario, he said, people need to prepare for a warmer world and “beef up” response plans. “Adaptation is not an admission that our current efforts are useless.”
WMO Weighs In On Global Warming
When it comes to this most recent climate news, the World Meteorological Organisation adopts a somewhat nuanced stance. According to the prediction, the global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2024 and 2028 will be between 1.1°C and 1.9°C higher than the 1850–1900 baseline. Additionally, there is an 86% chance that at least one of these years will break the current record for temperature, which was set in 2023. According to the WMO, there is a 47% chance that the average global temperature throughout the full five-year period between 2024 and 2028 will be more than 1.5° C above the pre-industrial era. The increase over the previous year’s report was 32%. The chance of at least one of the next five years exceeding 1.5° C has risen steadily since 2015, when it was close to zero.
“Behind these statistics lies the bleak reality that we are way off track to meet the (global warming) goals set in the Paris Agreement,” said WMO Deputy Secretary General Ko Barrett. “We must urgently do more to cut greenhouse gas emissions, or we will pay an increasingly heavy price in terms of trillions of dollars in economic costs, millions of lives affected by more extreme weather and extensive damage to the environment and biodiversity.”
As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated it, “We are gambling with the fate of our world. We require a way out of the motorway that leads to climate hell. And the good news is that we have control of the wheel. Under the supervision of today’s leaders, the fight to keep the rise in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be won or lost in the 2020s”.
According to the WMO, there are already catastrophic environmental impacts even at current levels of global warming. These consist of an increase in intense heatwaves, severe droughts and rainfall, a decrease in icebergs, sea ice, and glaciers, as well as a quickening of sea level rise and ocean warming. “Although we are living in extraordinary times, our ability to monitor the climate is also unparalleled, and this knowledge may guide our decisions. We may be able to return to these “cold” temperatures by the end of the century if we can stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere in the very near future, according to Carlo Buontempo. However, this run of hottest months will be remembered as relatively cold (in the future).
Read more: https://thelocaljournalist.com/climate-change-severe-heatwaves-ravages-the-us-in-2024-arent-normal/
