The United Nations’ weather agency has issued a dire report on the first day of COP29 talks: the planet is quickly surpassing the 1.5°C lower limit of the Paris Agreement climate goals.
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According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 2024 is on track to be the warmest year on record, with the global average temperature rise reported at 1.54°C between January and September this year.
This exceeds the long-term temperature goal set by the Paris Agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
“It’s another SOS for the planet. The ambitions of the Paris Agreement are in great peril,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo told the reporters at the UN Climate Change Convention in Baku, Azerbaijan.
“The record-breaking deadly heat, relentless drought and raging wildfires that we have seen in different parts of the world this year are unfortunately our new reality and a foretaste of our future,” she added.
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We urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen our monitoring and understanding of our changing climate. We need to step up support for climate change adaptation through climate information services and early warnings for all.
Celeste Saulo, secretary-general, World Meteorological Organization
Since June 2023, the WMO has documented 16 consecutive months of the hottest global mean temperatures on record. The past decade – 2015 to 2024 – has been the warmest 10 years in the world’s 175-year observational record.
Limiting temperature rise
However, the head of the WMO underscored that this year’s accelerated warming can largely be attributed to the natural El Niño phenomenon – emphasising that the “temporary” 1.54°C breach does not mean we have failed to meet the goals set in the international treaty for climate change.
Saulo noted that one or more individual years exceeding 1.5°C does not necessarily mean that pursuing efforts to limit global warming is out of reach. The WMO report highlighted that long-term warming – measured over decades – remains below 1.5°C.
“Recorded global temperature anomalies at daily, monthly and annual timescales are prone to large variations, partly because of natural phenomena,” said Saulo. “As monthly and annual warming temporarily surpass 1.5°C, they should not be equated to the long-term temperature goal set in the Paris Agreement, which refers to global temperature levels sustained as an average over decades.”
“However, it is essential to recognise that every fraction of a degree of warming matters. Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5°C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases climate extremes, impacts and risks,” she added.
The concentration of planet-warming greenhouse gases hit record levels at the end of 2023 – with real-time monitoring indicating that they continue to rise in 2024, according to the WMO’s State of the Climate report. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is expected to soon exceed 420 parts per million (ppm).
Driven by fossil fuel emissions, the average growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide has been 2.4 ppm per year for the past decade.
“We urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen our monitoring and understanding of our changing climate. We need to step up support for climate change adaptation through climate information services and early warnings for all,” Saulo concluded.
Hotter global temperatures have already wrought a cascading rise in extreme weather phenomena – with unprecedented glacier loss driving sea-level rise in many parts of the world.
According to the WMO, ice sheets and polar glaciers have shed a record 1.2 meters in water equivalent of ice in 2023 – a volume equivalent to five times the water in the Dead Sea, or about the same amount of water that passes through the Amazon River in a month. This marks the largest loss since measurements began in 1953.
This has partly contributed to accelerating rising sea levels. The year 2023 set a new observational record for annual global mean sea level rise. Between 2014 and 2023, world sea levels have risen by an average of 4.77 millimetres per year.
Rising ocean heat has also brought on stronger cyclones in some parts of the world and unusually low precipitation in other regions. The ocean absorbed around 3.1 million terawatt-hours (TWh) of heat in 2023 – equivalent to 18 times the world’s total energy consumption. Preliminary data from the early months of 2024 indicate that ocean heat content this year has continued to rise.
Experts have observed marine heatwaves as ‘superchargers’ of tropical cyclones – especially in Asia Pacific’s typhoon belt, while fueling prolonged droughts in regions like Africa.
“Climate catastrophe is hammering health, widening inequalities, harming sustainable development, and rocking the foundations of peace. The vulnerable are hardest hit,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres as COP29 opened on Monday.
