World sees first 12 mos above 1.5 C – monitor
PARIS: Earth has endured 12 months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial era for the first time on record, Europe’s climate monitor said on Thursday, in what scientists called a “warning to humanity.”
Storms, droughts and fires have lashed the planet as climate change, supercharged by the naturally occurring El Niño weather phenomenon, stoked record warming in 2023, likely making it the hottest in 100,000 years.
The extremes have continued into 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said, confirming that February 2023 to January 2024 saw warming of 1.52 C above the 19th-century benchmark.
That is a grave foretaste of the Paris climate deal’s crucial 1.5 C warming threshold, but it does not signal a permanent breach of the limit, which is measured over decades, scientists said.
“We are touching 1.5 C and we see … the social costs and economic costs,” said Johan Rockstrom of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
“1.5 is a very big number and it hurts us really badly in terms of heat waves, droughts, floods, reinforced storms [and] water scarcity across the entire world. That is what 2023 has taught us,” he added.
Recent months have seen an onslaught of extremes across the planet, including the devastating drought gripping the Amazon basin, sweltering winter temperatures in parts of southern Europe, deadly wildfires in South America and record rainfall in California.
“It is clearly a warning to humanity that we are moving faster than expected toward the agreed upon 1.5 C limit that we signed,” Rockstrom told Agence France-Presse (AFP), adding that temperatures were likely to fall back somewhat after El Niño comes to an end.
Copernicus said that last month was the hottest January on record — the eighth month in a row of historic high monthly temperatures — with temperatures 1.66 C warmer overall than an estimate of the January average for 1850–1900, the preindustrial reference period.
“2024 starts with another recordbreaking month. Not only is it the warmest January on record, but we have also just experienced a 12-month period of more than 1.5 C above the pre-industrial reference period,” C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess said.
Planet-heating emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, have continued to rise in recent years, when scientists say they need to fall by almost half this decade and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that the world is likely to crash through 1.5 C in the early 2030s.
“The succession of very hot years is bad news for both nature and people who are feeling the impacts of these extreme years,” Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told AFP.
“Unless global emissions are urgently brought down to zero, the world will soon fly past the safety limits set out in the Paris climate agreement.”
‘Off the charts’
Copernicus said January temperatures were well above average in northwestern Africa, the Middle East and central Asia, as well as eastern Canada and southern Europe.
But they were below average in parts of northern Europe, western Canada and the central region of the United States.
And while parts of the world experienced an unusually wet January, swathes of North America, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula saw drier conditions.
El Niño, which warms the sea surface in the southern Pacific, leading to hotter weather globally, has begun to weaken in the equatorial Pacific, Copernicus said.
Meanwhile, sea surface temperatures have continued to smash records.
Rockstrom said 2023 “is a year where ocean dynamics have simply gone berserk; it’s off the charts.”
Oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and have kept the Earth’s surface livable by absorbing 90 percent of the excess heat produced by the carbon pollution from human activity since the dawn of the industrial age.
Hotter oceans mean more moisture in the atmosphere, leading to increasingly erratic weather like fierce winds and powerful rain.