World will likely temporarily pass 1.5C climate limit by 2028: UN

GENEVA (AA/AFP) – Humanity now faces an 80 percent chance that Earth’s temperatures will at least temporarily exceed the key 1.5-degree Celsius mark during the next five years, the UN predicted Wednesday.

The global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2024 and 2028 is predicted to be between 1.1 C and 1.9 C higher than the 1850-1900 baseline, said a new report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Temperatures in at least one of these years will probably set a new record, beating 2023, currently the warmest year on record, the report underlined.

It said there was a 47% chance that the global temperature average over the entire five-year period will exceed 1.5 C above the pre-industrial era, an increase from 32% from last year’s report for 2023-2027.

The global average near-surface temperature was about 1.45 C in 2023, according to WMO. Last year’s record-high temperatures were fueled by long-term climate warming, combined with other factors, most notably a naturally occurring El Nino weather event, which is now waning.

“This report makes it clear that we are on a record-breaking warming path,” Ko Barrett, WMO’s deputy secretary-general, warned on Wednesday in a press conference in Geneva.

Barrett stressed that the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 C is “not yet dead” but “hanging on a thread” as the world is risking “trillions of dollars in economic losses, millions of lives upended and destruction of fragile and precious ecosystems and the biodiversity that exists.”

“As our planet enters this new record-breaking era, we can expect to see more oppressive heat waves affecting the health of billions of people and more increases in marine heatwaves, jeopardizing livelihoods and natural ecosystems along our coasts,” she said. “More sea level rise threatening coastal populations everywhere. More intense rainfall events, pushing our infrastructure beyond its limits.”

“Future scenarios many of us have feared are here now,” she warned.

“We are clearly on a path where we need to be changing that curve, instead of an upward trend of temperature,” she added.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, states committed to keeping the long-term global average surface temperature well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5 C by the end of this century.

The report came alongside another by the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announcing that last month was the hottest May on record, pointing to human-induced climate change.

The scientific community has repeatedly warned that warming of more than 1.5 C risks unleashing far more severe climate change impacts and extreme weather events.