Amid renewed warnings from leading climate scientists that global warming could reach 3C above pre-industrial levels this century, the head of the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) insisted on Wednesday that new technology and AI offer the opportunity to implement the drastic action needed to resist the existential crisis.
“The science is clear: we are far off track from achieving global climate goals. 2023 was the warmest year on record by a huge margin. Leading international data sets say that the first eight months of 2024 are also the warmest on record,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
She appealed for “urgent and ambitious action” in support of sustainable development, climate action and disaster risk reduction as “the decisions we make today could be the difference between a future breakdown or a breakthrough to a better world”.
Echoing the stark assessment of the latest UN-partnered United in Science report that record concentrations of greenhouse gases will fuel global temperature increase, Ms. Saulo noted that extreme weather “is wreaking havoc with our lives and our economies”.
Her comments came against a backdrop of deadly wildfires across Latin America and Portugal, along with catastrophic flooding in central Europe linked to Storm Boris that has inundated parts of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, and floods and landslides triggered by Typhoon Yagi that have ravaged Viet Nam, Myanmar, Laos and Thailand.
And in a call for global action coinciding with the upcoming Summit of the Future at UN headquarters in New York, the WMO chief underscored the untapped potential of natural and social sciences, new technology and innovation to help countries develop, reduce their vulnerability to disaster and adapt to climate change.