The world is approaching the warming threshold that international agreements are trying to prevent, with almost 50-50 chances for the Earth to temporarily reach this temperature mark in the next five years, predicted teams of meteorologists around the world.
With ongoing man-made climate change, there is a 48% chance that the globe will reach an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels since the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026. , a bright red signal in talks on climate change and science, a team of 11 different forecast centers forecast for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.
The chances increase with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasts set the odds close to 40%, up from 10% a decade ago.
The team, coordinated by the UK Meteorological Service, said in its five-year overall forecast that there was a 93% chance the world would set a record for the hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there was a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest in history. Weather forecasters also predict that the devastating firestorm in the southwestern United States will continue.
“We will see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said Leon Metmanson, a senior scientist at the UK Met Office, who is coordinating the report.
These forecasts are global and regional climate forecasts in annual and seasonal time scales, based on long-term averages and state-of-the-art computer simulations. They are different from increasingly accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or humid a day will be in certain places.
But even if the world reaches that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times – the globe has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s – it’s not quite the same as the global threshold, determined for the first time by international negotiators in the Paris Agreement of 2015. In 2018, a major UN scientific report predicts dramatic and dangerous consequences for people and the world if warming exceeds 1.5 degrees.
The global threshold of 1.5 degrees is that the world is so warm not for one year, but for a period of 20 or 30 years, several scientists said. This is not what the report predicts. Meteorologists can only say whether the Earth reaches this average in a year, maybe a decade or two, after it actually reached there, because it is a long-term average, Hermanson said.
“This is a warning of what will be average on average in a few years,” said Cornell University climatologist Natalie Mahawald, who was not on the forecasting team.
The forecast makes sense given how warm the world is now, and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (almost two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit) is expected due to man-made climate change over the next five years, said climate technology firm Zach Hausfater. Stripe and Berkeley Earth, which was not part of the forecasting teams. Add to that the possibility of a strong El Niño – the natural periodic warming of parts of the Pacific that are changing the world’s weather – which could temporarily throw a few tenths of a degree into the top and the world could reach 1.5 degrees.
The world is in the second consecutive year of La Nina, the opposite of El Niño, which has a slight global cooling effect, but is not enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases from coal, oil and natural gas, they said. scientists. The five-year forecast says La Nina is likely to end later this year or in 2023.
The greenhouse effect of fossil fuels is like placing global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Niño, La Nina and a handful of other natural weather variations are like stepping up or down this escalator, scientists said.
On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming in winter at three times the global average. While US Southwest and Southwest Europe are likely to be drier than normal over the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for the often dry Sahel region of Africa, northern Europe, northeastern Brazil and Australia, the report predicts.
The global team has been making these predictions unofficially for a decade and officially for about five years, with an accuracy of over 90%, Hermanson said.
NASA’s top climatologist Gavin Schmid said the figures in this report were “slightly warmer” than those used by NASA’s United States and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He also had doubts about the level of skills for long-term regional forecasts.
“Despite what is projected here, it is very likely that we will exceed 1.5 degrees C in the next decade, but that does not necessarily mean that we are committed to it in the long run – or that work to reduce further changes is it’s not worth it, “Schmid said in an email.
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