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Thanks to a combination of human-caused global warming and El Niño, global temperatures are expected to soar to record levels within the next five years, the United Nations’ weather agency said Wednesday.
The World Meteorological Organization said there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years – and the five-year period as a whole – will be the warmest on record.
In addition, there is a 66% likelihood that the annual average global temperature between 2023 and 2027 will be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for at least one year.
That number is critical because the 2015 Paris climate agreement set 1.5 degrees Celsius as a global guardrail in atmospheric warming, with countries pledging to try to prevent that much long-term warming if possible.
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Sounding the alarm
“This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5°C 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 1.5°C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency,” said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas.
Long-term warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius would increase heat waves, lengthen warm seasons and shorten cold seasons around the world. The 1.5-degree Celsius mark above the long-term global temperature is a level world leaders had hoped to avoid.
“Global mean temperatures are predicted to continue increasing, moving us away further and further away from the climate we are used to,” said Leon Hermanson, a United Kingdom Met Office expert scientist who led the report.
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‘Uncharted territory’
“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” Taalas warned. “This will have far-reaching repercussions for health, food security, water management and the environment. We need to be prepared.
“We haven’t been able to limit the warming so far and we are still moving in the wrong, wrong direction,” Taalas said at a Wednesday news conference.
The temporary warming of this year’s expected El Nino – which starts with a warming of parts of the central Pacific Ocean and then sloshes across the globe – makes it “possible for us to see a single year exceeding 1.5 C a full decade before the long-term average,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the WMO report.
“We don’t expect the longer-term average to pass 1.5 C until the early-to-mid 2030s,” Hausfather said.
What is El Niño?
El Niño is a natural climate pattern in which surface sea water temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean are warmer than average. El Niño and its counterpart, La Niña, can influence storms around the world, including hurricanes.
El Niños typically also impact global temperatures, pushing them higher to record levels. The current warmest year on record, 2016, occurred during an El Niño.
Impacts of climate change
According to the WMO, in addition to increasing global temperatures, human-induced greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are leading to:
- More ocean heating and acidification
- Sea ice and glacier melt
- Sea level rise
- More extreme weather
Contributing: The Associated Press
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