With the planet experiencing its highest temperatures in more than 100,000 years, scientists at the United Nations weather agency have crunched the numbers and come to a stark conclusion: more record years are almost inevitable.
Over the next five years, there is a nearly 90 percent chance that Earth will set another record for its warmest year, surpassing the scorching highs experienced in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report Wednesday.
The chances are almost as great that, in at least one of these five calendar years, the average global temperature will be 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than at the dawn of the industrial age. That’s the level of warming countries set out to avoid under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“The goal of limiting long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius hangs in the balance,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a speech in New York City on Wednesday. He called for urgent action in several areas, including reducing carbon dioxide emissions and adopting renewable energy, helping poor countries finance their climate plans and clamping down on the fossil fuel industry.
On the latter issue, Guterres reiterated earlier calls to end taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas. But he also turned his attention to a new target: He urged governments to ban advertising by fossil fuel companies, comparing oil and coal producers to the tobacco industry, which faces advertising restrictions around the world. And he urged media outlets and technology companies to stop showing his ads.
“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet; they are toxic to your brand,” Guterres said, referring to advertising and public relations agencies. “I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers of planetary destruction.”
Several publications, including The Guardian newspaper, have stopped accepting advertising about fossil fuels. The New York Times accepts ads from oil and gas companies with some restrictions, including a ban on sponsorship of its climate newsletter and climate events, a company spokesperson said. The Times also doesn’t allow fossil fuel companies to buy all the ads for individual episodes of its podcast “The Daily.”
Earth’s latest streak of record heat began in the middle of last year and has not let up as another northern hemisphere summer approaches.
Last month was the planet’s warmest May on record, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced Wednesday. This made it the 12th consecutive month in which the average temperature around the world surpassed all previous records for that time of year. During that 12-month period, the mercury was 1.63 degrees Celsius warmer on average than during pre-industrial times, according to Copernicus.
The Paris Agreement says that the 1.5 degree goal is a “long-term” goal. Technically speaking, this means that the world will not have fulfilled the pact only if temperatures exceed the threshold for many years, even decades, and not just one year.
“Temporary breaches do not mean that the 1.5 target is permanently missed,” Ko Barrett, deputy secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said at a news conference. Still, what now seems clear, he added, is that these types of violations will become increasingly common.
The effects of the abnormal heat have been felt around the world. In India and other parts of South Asia, temperatures have surpassed 110 degrees Fahrenheit in recent weeks, pushing many people to the brink. Millions of Americans in California, Nevada and Arizona are experiencing their first intense heat wave of the season this week.
Recent flooding in Brazil caused widespread death and destruction and could become the country’s costliest disaster ever recorded. The multi-day torrential rains that caused the deluges were twice as likely because of the extra thermal energy added to the atmosphere by human activity, scientists said this week.
Across the world’s oceans, coral reefs are experiencing the most widespread bleaching ever observed, largely because of how warm the water has been. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expects this year’s Atlantic hurricane season to be exceptionally stormy, with between 17 and 25 named tropical cyclones. Record-breaking ocean temperatures, which provide the thermodynamic fuel for storms to form and intensify, are a major factor.
As global warming continues, “this series of warmer months will be remembered as comparatively cold,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus. By rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth could cool back to current temperatures by the end of the century, he said.
There is at least one reason to believe that some temporary relief is on the way. El Niño, the natural weather phenomenon, is fading. During periodic El Niño events, enormous amounts of heat are redistributed in the Pacific Ocean, causing changes in global weather patterns that typically make the planet as a whole warmer. This contributed, at least in part, to the record temperatures of 2023.
Other taxpayers could stay longer. In a study published last week, a team of scientists led by Tianle Yuan, a geophysicist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, estimated that the planet could be experiencing additional warming right now for a contradictory reason: recent regulations that reduced air pollution from ships.
Burning fuel oil releases planet-warming carbon dioxide, but it also releases sulfur compounds that can have a modest opposite effect. Once in the atmosphere, these compounds transform into particles that help cool the planet, either by reflecting sunlight back into space or encouraging the formation of more clouds.
These pollutants still harm human health and ecosystems, which is why the International Maritime Organization set new limits on sulfur emissions from ships starting in 2020. But in doing so, the agency may have inadvertently helped to the Earth today being a little warmer than it would have been otherwise. been, Dr. Yuan and his colleagues estimated.
For scientists, the main driver of warming remains clear: atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, the three most important man-made heat-trapping gases, have continued their steady rise. At the current rate of emissions, it could be only about five more years before humans have altered the chemistry of the atmosphere so significantly that it becomes nearly impossible to prevent warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius, scientists estimated.