The United Nations (UN) has issued a warning that there’s an 80% chance Earth’s temperatures will exceed the critical 1.5-degree Celsius mark over the next five years.
The 2015 Paris Climate Accords set an ambitious target of limiting the world’s temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, this target was meant to refer “to long-term temperature increases over decades, not over one to five years,” according to the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
This alarming forecast came alongside another report by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which announced that last month was the hottest May on record. This data points to human-induced climate change and spurred UN chief Antonio Guterres to compare humanity’s impact on the world to “the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.”
The likelihood of temporarily exceeding the 1.5°C threshold in the next five years has been rising steadily since 2015 when the chance was estimated to be close to zero, noted the UN’s weather and climate agency. “There is an 80% likelihood that the annual average global temperature will temporarily exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one of the next five years,” the WMO stated.
Dramatic climate shifts have begun taking a heavy toll worldwide, fueling extreme weather events, flooding, and drought, while glaciers are rapidly melting and sea levels are rising.
“We are on a record-breaking warming path,” WMO deputy chief Ko Barrett told reporters in Geneva. “WMO is sounding the alarm that we will be exceeding the 1.5°C level temporarily with increasing frequency.” Barrett added that “we have already temporarily surpassed this level for individual months.”
Temperature levels are rising, with 2023 by far the hottest year on record, amid warnings that 2024 could be even hotter. The WMO predicts that the mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2024 and 2028 will be 1.1-1.9°C above the pre-industrial levels recorded between 1850 and 1900.
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