Met Office warns 1.5C may be exceeded soon
THERE is a 50-50 chance that temperatures will temporarily exceed the key 1.5C threshold for global warming in the next five years, a Met Office study has warned.
The annual update forecasts that one of the years between 2022 and 2026 is very likely to be the warmest on record globally, beating the current record hot year of 2016.
It is also likely that one of the years in the next half-decade will see annual average temperatures exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the report produced for the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.
Under the global Paris climate treaty, countries pledged to curb temperature rises to 2C and pursue efforts to limit them to 1.5C above 19th century levels to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change. In 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, the chance of temporarily exceeding 1.5C was close to zero, the WMO said.
The world is already seeing increasing floods, storms, heatwaves and wildfires as a result of climate change of around 1.1C in 2021, and beyond 1.5C of warming, more extreme weather, crop damage and losses of key systems such as coral reefs are expected. Some vulnerable countries, such as low-lying island states, warn that going beyond 1.5C threatens their very survival.
The report’s lead expert, Dr Leon Hermanson, of the Exeter-based Met Office, said: “Our latest climate predictions show that continued global temperature rise will continue, with an even chance that one of the years between 2022 and 2026 will exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
“A single year of exceedance above 1.5C does not mean we have breached the iconic threshold of the Paris Agreement, but it does reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5C could be exceeded for an extended period.”
The Met Office report said the annual global average surface temperature for any year in the next five is predicted to be to be between 1.1C and 1.7C higher than pre-industrial levels. The chance of at least one year exceeding the 1.5C threshold is 48% over the period, but there is only a small chance (10%) of the whole five-year average being above the threshold, while the chance of at least one of the years between 2022 and 2026 exceeding the current record warmest year of 2016 is more than 90%.
■ Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has not wrecked the Glasgow Climate Pact agreed at Cop26 but has presented a “challenge” to it, according to United States climate envoy John Kerry. He said the war had spurred on Europe to increase its renewable energy by using gas supplies as a weapon. The former US secretary of state was speaking to the BBC for a podcast called No Hot Air.
The Glasgow Climate Pact called on countries to phase down unabated coal power and inefficient fuel subsidies as part of action on climate change. Asked if Russia’s president had wrecked the Glasgow Pact, Mr Kerry said: “He hasn’t wrecked it but he’s presented a challenge to it. What Vladimir Putin has done, by using gas energy as a weapon, is to convince Europe that it has to move faster. Europe is going to try to move to deploy renewable energy much faster than they originally had planned.”