Climate News: Global temperatures expected to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius rise by 2027, says WMO

Within the next two years, the world is on course to surpass the 1.5ºC warming limit set by the Paris Agreement, a new report from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has found.

The Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty signed by 195 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris in 2015. Its main goal is to keep “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels” and make efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels”.

However, the report from WMO predicts that the average global temperature will transcend 1.5º C above pre-industrial levels by 2027, which comes a full decade earlier than previously projected. Additionally, there is an 80% chance that the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years. These projections from WMO stem from over 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centres of scientists.

Coastal cities and small islands are at risk due to melting Arctic ice, which will continue to warm 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world

WMO climate services director Chris Hewitt estimates that, accounting for the past 10 years and predicting the next 10 years, the world is now somewhere around 1.4º C hotter than the mid 1800s.

Even if 1.5ºC does not sound like much, such an increase would have serious effects. Scientists expect more extreme weather, including acute heat waves, ecosystem collapses, crop failures, and strained water supplies. Coastal cities and small islands are at risk due to melting Arctic ice, which will continue to warm 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world.

Johan Rockstrom – director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany – explained that with every 10^th of a degree that the world warms from human-induced climate change, “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events” including heat waves, droughts, fires, floods, and hurricanes.

Despite the world agreeing to attempt to limit warming below this threshold at COP21, fossil fuel emissions have persistently continued, and  other progress has proven to be too slow.

Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist and climate research lead at Stripe, said: “There is no way, barring geoengineering, to prevent global temperatures from going over 1.5 degrees.”