Climate crises likely in 2020

WMO confirms past decade was world’s hottest on record

The past decade has been the hottest on record, the UN said on Wednesday, warning that the higher temperatures were expected to fuel numerous extreme weather events in 2020 and beyond.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which based its findings on analysis of leading international datasets, said increases in global temperatures had already had dire consequences, pointing to “retreating ice, record sea levels, increasing ocean heat and acidification, and extreme weather.”

WMO said its research also confirmed data released by the European Union’s climate monitor last week showing that 2019 was the second hottest year on record, after 2016.

“The year 2020 has started out where 2019 left off – with high-impact weather and climate-related events,” WMO chief Petteri Taalas said in a statement, pointing in particular to the devastating bushfires that have been raging in Australia for months.

The bushfires, unprecedented in their duration and intensity, have claimed 28 lives and highlighted the type of disasters that scientists say the world will increasingly face due to global warming. The fires have already destroyed over 2,000 homes and burnt 100,000 square kilometers of land – an area larger than S.Korea or Portugal. “Unfortunately, we expect to see much extreme weather throughout 2020 and the coming decades, fuelled by record levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Taalas said.

The UN agency said that average global temperatures during both the past five-year (2015-19) and 10-year (201019) periods were the highest ever recorded. “Since the 1980s each decade has been warmer than the previous one,” the UN agency said, warning that “this trend is expected to continue.”

The UN said last year that man-made greenhouse gas emissions needed to tumble 7.6 percent each year to 2030 to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius – the more ambitious cap nations signed up to in the landmark Paris climate deal. Current pledges to cut emissions put Earth on a path of several degrees warming by the end of the century.

Taalas said that since modern records began in 1850, the average global temperature had risen by around 1.1 degrees, and warned of significant warming in the future. “On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, we are heading towards a temperature increase of three to five degrees Celsius by the end of the century,” he warned.

Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies which provided one of the datasets, added that the trend line was unmistakable and could not be attributed to normal climate variability – a position taken by US President Donald Trump.

Data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration meanwhile revealed that polar sea ice coverage continued its downward trend in 2019.