CLIMATE CHANGE
Date: 18-05-2023
WMO Report. Flirting with climate danger: UN forecasts 2 in 3 chance of briefly hitting key heat limit soon.
The real concern is the deep water of oceans, which absorb an overwhelming majority of the world's human-caused warming, leading to a steady rise in ocean heat content and new records set regularly.
- There's a two-out-of-three chance within the next five years that the world will temporarily reach the internationally accepted global temperature threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change, a new World Meteorological Organisation report forecasts.
- It likely would only be a fleeting and less worrisome flirtation with the agreed-upon climate danger point, the United Nations weather agency said on Wednesday.
- That's because scientists expect a temporary burst of heat from an El Nino will supercharge human-caused warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas to new heights and then slip back down a bit.
- The 2015 Paris climate agreement set 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) as a global guardrail in atmospheric warming, with countries pledging to try to prevent that much long-term warming if possible.
- Scientists in a special 2018 United Nations report said going past that point would be drastically and dangerously different with more death, destruction and damage to global ecosystems.
- “It won't be this year probably. Maybe it'll be next year or the year after” that a year averages 1.5 degrees Celsius, said report lead author Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom's Met Office.
- But climate scientists said what's likely to happen in the next five years isn't the same as failing the global goal.
- “This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5C level specified in the Paris Agreement which refers to long-term warming over many years. However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.