When 2024’s record-breaking global average temperature exceeded the Paris Agreement-set 1.5-degrees Celsius warming threshold, the oft repeated warning was that a single year above that mark does not mean the target is entirely dead. Scientists instead would look for the average to be more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures for a period of years or decades. Well, we’re probably on the way.
“We have just experienced the ten warmest years on record,” said Ko Barrett, the WMO’s deputy secretary-general, in a press release. “Unfortunately, this WMO report provides no sign of respite over the coming years, and this means that there will be a growing negative impact on our economies, our daily lives, our ecosystems and our planet.”
Among the report’s other highlights are the 80 percent chance that at least one of the next five years will crack 2024’s warmest year record, and an 86 percent chance that at least one of those years will top the 1.5-degree barrier again. There’s also some exceptionally bad news in the polar regions, which are slated to keep warming faster than the rest of the planet. The average temperature anomaly in the Arctic is expected to be 2.4 degrees C above the 1991 to 2020 norm, which is fully three and a half times that of the globe at large. With the recent news that even current levels of warming are basically too much for the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to handle… well, it’s not great.
That 70 percent chance for a 1.5-degree half decade has been rising along with the temperature. In the same WMO report last year, the coming five years (2024 through 2028) had a 47 percent chance of cracking it. In 2023, the number was 32 percent. Meanwhile, with the Trump administration and the US leading the way, much of the world is backsliding on climate policy. “It’s not a scientific denial, it’s an economic denial,” said André Corrêa do Lago, who is heading up the COP30 UN climate meeting that will take place in Brazil later this year, according to the Guardian. (In this country at least, with these people in charge, it is that but it is also, in fact, scientific denial.)
There are what can be considered bright spots, like the world’s biggest emitter’s all-out blitz of renewable energy construction, but for the most part things are going in the wrong direction.
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