At least one of the years between now and 2028 will very likely set a new temperature record breaking through the crucial 1.5°C temperature limit, the UN weather agency, WMO, said on Wednesday.
Latest forecast from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) indicates that there is an 80 per cent likelihood that the world will see the annual average global temperature temporarily exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one of the next five years.
“WMO is sounding the alarm that we will be exceeding the 1.5°C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency. We have already temporarily surpassed this level for individual months – and indeed as averaged over the most recent 12-month period,” said WMO Deputy Secretary-General Ko Barrett.
She underscored, however, that temporary breaches do not mean that the 1.5 °C goal set in the Paris Agreement is permanently lost because it refers to long-term warming over decades.
The global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2024 and 2028 is predicted to be between 1.1°C and 1.9°C higher than the 1850-1900 baseline.
There is a 47 per cent likelihood that the global temperature averaged over the entire five-year 2024-2028 period will exceed 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial era, says the WMO Global Annual to Decadal Update – up from 32 per cent from last year’s report for the 2023-2027 period.
The chance of such spikes in temperature – currently at 80 per cent – has been rising steadily since 2015, when such a probalility was close to zero. For the years between 2017 and 2021, there was a 20 per cent chance of surpassing the limit, and this increased to a 66 per cent chance between 2023 and 2027.