, citing record-smashing increases last year in greenhouse gases, land and water temperatures and melting of glaciers and sea ice, and is warning that the world's efforts to reverse the trend have been inadequate.said there is a “high probability” that 2024 will be another record-hot year.
The 12-month period from March 2023 to February 2024 pushed beyond that 1.5-degree limit, averaging 1.56 degrees higher, according to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Service. It said the calendar year 2023 was just below 1.5 degrees at 1.48 degrees, but a record hot start to this year pushed beyond that level for the 12-month average.
“So we cannot say definitively about 2024 is going to be the warmest year. But what I would say: there is a high probability that 2024 will again break the record of 2023, but let’s wait and see,” he said. “January was the warmest January on record. So the records are still being broken.” “Topping all the bad news, what worries me the most is that the planet is now in a meltdown phase — literally and figuratively given the warming and mass loss from our polar ice sheets,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, who wasn’t involved in the report.
“This list of record-smashing events is truly distressing, though not a surprise given the steady drumbeat of extreme events over the past year,” said University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs, who also wasn't involved in the WMO report. “The full cost of climate-change-accelerated events across sectors and regions has never been calculated in a meaningful way, but the cost to biodiversity and to the quality of life of future generations is incalculable.