Rising global temperature 'inexorably close' to climate tipping, UN warns

There is now a 40% chance that global temperatures will temporarily reach 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the next five years — and these odds are rising, Japan Times reports, citing UN findings.

This does not yet mean that the world would already be crossing the long-term warming 1.5-degree threshold set by the Paris Agreement of 2015, which scientists warn is the ceiling to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. The Paris pact target looks at temperature over a 30-year average, rather than a single year.

But it does underscore that “we are getting measurably and inexorably closer” to that threshold, UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. Taalas described the study as “yet another wake-up call” to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Every year from 2021 through 2025 is likely to be at least 1 degree warmer, according to the study.

The report also predicts a 90% chance that at least one of those years will become the warmest year on record, topping 2016 temperatures.

In 2020 — one of the three warmest years on record — the global average temperature was 1.2 degrees above the pre-industrial baseline, according to an April WMO report.

“There’s a little bit of up and down in the annual temperatures,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. “But these long term-trends are unrelenting.”

“It seems inevitable that we’re going to cross these boundaries,” Schmidt said, “and that’s because there are delays in the system, there is inertia in the system, and we haven’t really made a big cut to global emissions as yet.”

Almost all regions are likely to be warmer in the next five years than in the recent past, the WMO said.

The WMO uses temperature data from multiple sources including NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.