Pyrenean ski resorts at Saint-Lary-Soulan in France face a snow shortage due to abnormally high temperatures caused by global warming. Photo / AFP
Pyrenean ski resorts at Saint-Lary-Soulan in France face a snow shortage due to abnormally high temperatures caused by global warming. Photo / AFP
The United Nations today warned there is a 70% chance average warming from 2025 to 2029 will exceed the 1.5C international benchmark.
The planet is therefore expected to remain at historic levels of warming after the two hottest years ever recorded in 2023 and 2024, according to an annual climatereport published by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the UN’s weather and climate agency.
“We have just experienced the 10 warmest years on record,” said the WMO’s deputy secretary-general Ko Barrett.
“Unfortunately, this WMO report provides no sign of respite over the coming years, and this means that there will be a growing negative impact on our economies, our daily lives, our ecosystems and our planet.”
The 2015 Paris climate accords aimed to limit global warming to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels – and to 1.5C if possible.
The targets are calculated relative to the 1850-1900 average, before humanity began industrially burning coal, oil, and gas, which emits carbon dioxide (CO2) – the greenhouse gas largely responsible for climate change.
The more optimistic 1.5C target is one that growing numbers of climate scientists now consider impossible to achieve, as CO2 emissions are still increasing.
Five-year outlook
The WMO’s latest projections are compiled by Britain’s Met Office national weather service, based on forecasts from multiple global centres.
The agency forecasts the global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2025 and 2029 will be between 1.2C and 1.9C above the pre-industrial average.
It says there is a 70% chance that average warming across the 2025-29 period will exceed 1.5C.
“This is entirely consistent with our proximity to passing 1.5C on a long-term basis in the late 2020s or early 2030s,” said Peter Thorne, director of the Irish Climate Analysis and Research Units group at the University of Maynooth.
“I would expect in two to three years this probability to be 100%” in the five-year outlook, he added.
The WMO says there is an 80% chance that at least one year between 2025 and 2029 will be warmer than the warmest year on record (2024).
Floodwater flowsa through Parramatta Wharf in Sydney on May 23. Record floods cut a destructive path through eastern Australia that day, caking houses in silt, washing out roads and separating 50,000 people from help. Photo / AFP
Longer-term outlook
To smooth out natural climate variations, several methods assess long-term warming, the WMO’s climate services director Christopher Hewitt told a press conference.
One approach combines observations from the past 10 years with projections for the next decade.
This predicts the 20-year average warming for 2015-34 will be 1.44C.
There is no consensus yet on how best to assess long-term warming.
The EU’s climate monitor Copernicus reckons warming currently stands at 1.39C, and projects 1.5C could be reached in mid-2029 or sooner.
Although “exceptionally unlikely” at 1%, there is now an above-zero chance of at least one year in the next five exceeding 2C of warming.
“It’s the first time we’ve ever seen such an event in our computer predictions,” said the Met Office’s Adam Scaife.
“It is shocking,” and “that probability is going to rise”.
He recalled that a decade ago, forecasts first showed the very low probability of a calendar year exceeding the 1.5C benchmark. However, that came to pass in 2024.
‘Dangerous’ level of warming
Every fraction of a degree of additional warming can intensify heatwaves, extreme precipitation, droughts and the melting of ice caps, sea ice and glaciers.
Last week, China recorded temperatures exceeding 40C in some areas, the United Arab Emirates nearly 52C and Pakistan was hit by deadly winds after an intense heatwave.
“We’ve already hit a dangerous level of warming” with recent “deadly floods in Australia, France, Algeria, India, China and Ghana, wildfires in Canada”, said climatologist Friederike Otto of Imperial College London.
“Relying on oil, gas and coal in 2025 is total lunacy.”
Other warnings
Arctic warming is predicted to continue to outstrip the global average over the next five years, said the WMO.
Sea ice predictions for March 2025-29 suggest further reductions in the Barents Sea, the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk.
Forecasts suggest South Asia will be wetter than average across the next five years.
Precipitation patterns also suggest wetter than average conditions in the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and northern Siberia, and drier than average conditions over the Amazon.
