Last year, the warmest in a 175-year record, was the first that the global average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is at its highest in 800,000 years. Sea level rise pace has doubled since the satellite monitoring era began. The ten warmest years on record were the last ten years. And it goes on.
All that and more is from the World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Global Climate Report, released on Wednesday. As with every new climate report, it paints an increasingly dire picture of the warming world, at a moment when the world’s second biggest emitter and biggest economy is in the process fully abandoning its leadership position in tackling the problem.
“Our planet is issuing more distress signals,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in a press release accompanying the report. He said that the 1.5-degree target laid out in the Paris Agreement is still possible — extremely shaky claim at this point, many scientists would say — if there are national leaders out there willing to make the right moves. “Leaders must step up to make it happen — seizing the benefits of cheap, clean renewables for their people and economies.”
The litany of those “distress signals,” known as “indicators” throughout the report, reads like a disaster movie in slow motion. The 18 lowest Arctic sea ice extent years were… the last 18 years. The lowest three for Antarctic ice were… the last three. Each of the past eight years set a new record for the amount of heat found in the oceans. The largest loss of glacial ice mass over a three-year period occurred, yes, in the last three years. The rate of ocean warming between 2005 and 2024 is more than twice the rate seen between 1960 and 2005.
“While a single year above 1.5 °C of warming does not indicate that the long-term temperature goals of the Paris Agreement are out of reach, it is a wake-up call that we are increasing the risks to our lives, economies and to the planet,” said the WMO’s Secretary-General, Celeste Saulo.
US leadership, of course, no longer believes that to be the case. In a series of deeply unpopular moves, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement again, installed military leadership that is abandoning climate programs they think are “woke” and “crap,” and is in the process of completely hobbling climate-critical agencies like the EPA and NOAA. We are now more or less leaving it to China, India, the European Union, and a few other major emitters and economies to pick up the slack.
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