Team Blitz India
CLIMATE experts on this year’s World Environment Day have issued a strong warning of severe global warming. The planet is experiencing its warmest May on record – in turn bringing the tally to twelve consecutive months of record-breaking globally, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
Places like Southeast Asia and India saw record early-summer high temperatures in May.
The WMO report provides more evidence that the planet is very close to failing to meet the Paris Agreement climate targets, which aim to limit the average global temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius since the Industrial Revolution on the moderate emissions scenario, and a 2-degree Celsius rise in the worstcase scenario. There also is an increasing likelihood that the world will temporarily surpass the 1.5 Celsius target of additional warming more often, which has already happened several times this year, according to the report.
1.5 degrees threshold
There is an 86% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, between 2024 and 2028, will surpass 2023 to become the warmest on record, the WMO report found. There is also an 80% chance that at least one of those years will temporarily exceed the 1.5-degree Celsius threshold, according to the report. The global average annual temperature for each year between 2024 and 2028 is predicted to be between 1.1 Celsius and 1.9 Celsius higher than the average temperature during the years of the pre-industrial reference period, from 1850 to 1900, also according to the report. This relentless stretch of new global temperature records was driven by a strong El Niño event in the equatorial eastern Pacific and amplified by human-caused climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions, scientists found.
Appeal to G20 countries
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres urged world leaders, especially those in G20 countries, to do more to meet climate goals by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping people adapt to climate events, describing the present as “climate crunch time.”
