Sopuruchi Onwuka

Global weather agencies warn that the earth will grapple with extreme, more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable temperature consistently in the next five years; amplifying the urgent need for the world governments to accelerate climate action.

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According to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office, two of the world’s top weather agencies, the world would again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago.

According to the agencies, the projections indicate 80 per cent chance the world would break another annual temperature record in the next five years, 86 per cent chance that one of the next five years would pass 1.5 degrees, and a 70 per cent chance that the five years as a whole would average more than that global milestone.

Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald agreed with that report, saying that “higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts.”

Mahowald was not part of the calculations but said the report made sense, noting that “higher global temperatures translate to more lives lost.”

Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was not part of the research, wrote in an email that “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” with every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change .

And for the first time there was a slight chance that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature would shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.

The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centres of scientists.

The same teams had 10 years ago figured that there was a similar remote chance – about 1 per cent – that one of the coming years would exceed that critical 1.5 degree threshold and then it happened last year.

This year, a 2-degree Celsius above pre-industrial year enters the equation in a similar manner, something UK Met Office longer term predictions chief Adam Scaife and science scientist Leon Hermanson called shocking.

“It’s not something anyone wants to see, but that’s what the science is telling us,” Hermanson said. Two degrees of warming is the secondary threshold, the one considered less likely to break, set by the 2015 Paris agreement.

Technically, even though 2024 was 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial times, the Paris climate agreement’s threshold is for a 20-year time period, so it has not been exceeded.

Factoring in the past 10 years and forecasting the next 10 years, the world was probably about 1.4 degrees hotter since the mid 1800s, World Meteorological Organization climate services director Chris Hewitt estimated.

“With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5 degrees warmer than preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of heat. Also we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries out the landscape,” said Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter.

Ice in the Arctic – which will continue to warm 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world – will melt and seas will rise faster, Hewitt said.

What tends to happen is that global temperatures rise like riding on an escalator, with temporary and natural El Nino weather cycles acting like jumps up or down on that escalator, scientists said. But lately, after each jump from an El Nino, which adds warming to the globe, the planet doesn’t go back down much, if at all.

“Record temperatures immediately become the new normal,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson.