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Earth Stands ‘50:50’ Chance Of Passing 1.5 Degrees Warming Within 5 Years

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Global average temperatures now have a roughly fifty-fifty chance of temporarily rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrial levels within five years, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization.

The 1.5 degree figure represents an important threshold, as it is nominally the preferred warming limit set by the 2015 Paris Agreement—a limit that nations hope will be sufficient to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

According to the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update released by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the period 2017-2021 saw only a 10% chance of 1.5 degrees being exceeded. But for 2022, that likelihood now stands at 48%.

“This study shows—with a high level of scientific skill—that we are getting measurably closer to temporarily reaching the lower target of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary-General.

“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 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” said Leon Hermanson, a researcher from the U.K. Met Office, who led the report.

However, Hermanson noted, “A single year of exceedance above 1.5 Celsius 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 1.5 Celsius could be exceeded for an extended period.”

That observation is an important one: according to experts, a temporary rise in excess of 1.5 Celsius does not constitute a failure to achieve Paris Agreement goals.

Writing in Carbon Brief in 2017, Joeri Rogelj, director of research at the Grantham Institute and Reader in Climate Science & Policy, and Carl-Friedrich Schleussner, head of Climate Science at Climate Analytics and Group Leader at Humboldt University Berlin, explained that, to determine whether the Paris goal had been breached, natural variabilities in the Earth’s climate cycle would need to be accounted for. Natural, “unforced” climate phenomena such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, volcanic eruptions and variations in solar activity all contributed to large variations in global average temperatures. Therefore, they said, even when temperatures pass 1.5 Celsius, “this won’t necessarily mean we’ve reached 1.5C of human-caused warming because a single month or year is also subject to natural variability.”

But they did concede that such a warming level “will provide an important warning shot” for humanity.

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The Met Office report is the latest in a series of increasingly detailed warnings from researchers about the direction and pace of climate change. In January, researchers at U.S. climate center Berkeley Earth found that Earth’s long-term average temperature would hit 1.5 degrees Celsius by around 2033 and “2 degrees Celsius will be reached around 2060.”

Earlier this month, NASA found that the amount of energy that the Earth retains from the Sun has risen yet again. At the same time, NOAA measured record high ocean heat content.

Last month, UN climate body the IPCC warned that, in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, global emissions would need to peak well before 2025—a timetable that looks out of reach as a result of government inaction. On the release of that report, UN head Antonio Guterres publicly berated world leaders for breaking their climate promises, saying: “They are lying. It is time to stop burning our planet.”

The Earth has warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius since industrial times as a result of human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels. That rise in temperatures has already led to widespread climate impacts worldwide, from intensifying wildfires and floods to deadly heatwaves. In India and Pakistan, an ongoing extreme heatwave affecting more than a billion people has killed dozens and has badly damaged desperately needed crops. In the Horn of Africa, a worsening drought, exacerbated by climate change, is threatening the lives of 20 million people.

The WMO Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update can be viewed here [PDF].

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