World warming will briefly reach the 1.5 degree threshold in the next five years | Wilnesh News

The world may briefly climb above a crucial warming threshold within the next five years, the United Nations weather agency said on Wednesday, underscoring the urgent need to cut climate change. planetary heating emission of greenhouse gases.

There is an 80% chance that current global average temperatures will be 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels for at least one more year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a landmark report released on World Environment Day. One year between 2024 and 2028.

This is a marked change from 2015, when the World Meteorological Organization considered the prospect of temporarily exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius near zero.

The 1.5-degree Celsius limit is the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement, the landmark international treaty on climate change adopted in 2015.

Scientists say exceeding this temperature threshold over the long term will lead to increasingly frequent and catastrophic extreme weather events.

Even though current level Global warming has already caused devastating impacts of climate change. These include record-breaking heat waves, extreme rainfall events and droughts, accelerated sea level rise and ocean warming, and dramatic reductions in ice caps and sea ice.

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a major speech on Wednesday. “We need a highway exit ramp to climate hell. The truth is we Take control of the wheel.”

Guterres said the fight to keep long-term temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius will be won or lost in the 2020s under the watchful eyes of today’s world leaders.

Speaking at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Guterres called for more ambitious action to combat the climate crisis ahead of the G7 summit in Italy on June 13-15.

“Everything depends on the decisions those leaders make – or fail to make – especially over the next 18 months. This is a critical moment in the climate crisis,” he added.

extreme heat is The climate crisis is intensifying, driven largely by burning of fossil fuels.

The World Meteorological Organization said in the report that the global annual average temperature from 2024 to 2028 is expected to be 1.1 degrees Celsius to 1.9 degrees Celsius higher than the baseline from 1850 to 1900.

The report said there was about a 50-50 chance that average global temperatures would exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius over the entire five-year period compared with pre-industrial times, up from 32% in last year’s report assessing 2023 to 2027.

The report said that at least one year in 2028 is likely to set a new temperature record, surpassing 2023 – currently the hottest year on record.

“Behind these statistics lies a stark reality: we are still far from achieving the goals set out in the Paris Agreement,” Co Barrett, deputy secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in a statement.

“We must urgently do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or we will pay an increasingly heavy price, including trillions of dollars in economic costs, millions of lives affected by more extreme weather, and environmental and biodiversity consequences. widespread chemical destruction.

Global annual temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius for the first time between February 2023 and January 2024, although scientists stress that monthly and annual breaches of threshold limits do not mean the world is failing to comply with the long-term provisions of the Paris Agreement. .

The WMO said it was “sounding the alarm” that global temperatures could temporarily exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius with increasing frequency.