The forecast from the world’s leading meteorological agencies is not good at all
Prepare for several years of deadly heat with record temperatures pushing Earth toward even more lethal, hellish, and uncomfortable extremes, warned the world’s two largest meteorological agencies in a five-year forecast released today.
There is an 80 percent chance that another annual temperature record will be broken within the next five years, and it is even more likely that the world will again exceed the international 1.5-degree threshold established a decade ago as the limit that must not be breached, according to the forecast by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Met Office.
- Rising global temperatures may sound abstract, but they translate into real-life consequences through an increased likelihood of extreme weather events: stronger hurricanes, heavier rainfall, droughts. Therefore, rising global temperatures result in a higher number of lost lives – said climate scientist from Cornell University Natalie Mahowald.
– For every tenth of a degree Celsius the world warms due to human-induced climate change, we will face increasingly frequent and extreme events – particularly heatwaves, but also droughts, floods, wildfires, and more intense hurricanes and typhoons – said the director of the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Johan Rockström in a statement to the AP.
Mahowald and Rockström did not participate in the research behind the five-year forecast produced by the two global meteorological agencies.
Breaking the Climate Warming Limit
For the first time, there is also a – albeit slim – chance that before the end of this decade, global temperatures will breach the 1.5-degree Celsius warming limit set by the Paris Climate Agreement and reach a much more dangerous level of 2 degrees Celsius, the two agencies announced.
There is an 86 percent chance that one of the next five years will surpass the 1.5-degree warming level, and a 70 percent chance that the five-year average will be above that threshold, the forecast adds.
The forecast was created by 200 forecasters using computer simulations from 10 global scientific centers.
