Prepare for years of record high temperatures that push the planet to a more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extreme, the predictions of two of the world's top weather agencies.
According to a five-year forecast released by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office on Wednesday, the world will get an 80% chance in the next five years, breaking the temperature record for another year in the next five years, and is more likely to once again surpass the international temperature threshold 10 years ago.
“The higher global average temperatures sound abstract, but it translates into higher extreme weather opportunities in real life: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, drought,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University. “So higher global average temperatures translate into more loss of life.”
At every degree, the world is warmed by human-induced climate change. “We will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (especially heat waves, as well as droughts, floods, fires and human-intensified hurricanes/typhoons), Johan Rockstrom emailed the director of Potsdam Rockstrom, and the director of Potsdam Rockstrom at the German Climate Research Institute. He is not part of the study.
The two agencies say that, by the end of the decade, the world annual temperatures will exceed the Paris climate agreement’s target, with a warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) and a 2C (3.6F) warming (3.6F) since the mid-1800s.
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They believe that one of the next five years will exceed 1.5 degrees, while the average of the entire five years is 86% likely to exceed a global milestone.
These predictions come from more than 200 predictions that were simulated using computer simulations run by 10 global scientist centers.
Ten years ago, the same team believed that one of the upcoming years would exceed the critical 1.5-degree threshold, which then happened last year. This year, two degrees Celsius Celsius, more than a year before industry, entered the equation in a similar way, Adam Scaife, the long-term forecasting director for the UK Metropolitan Office, and scientist Leon Hermanson, called it “shocking.”
“It's not something anyone wants to see, but that's what science tells us,” Hermanson said. The secondary threshold is two levels of warming, which is the possibility of a deemed smaller rupture set by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Technically, even if 2024 is 1.5c higher than the pre-industrial era, the Paris Climate Agreement threshold is 20 years, so it has not been exceeded. Since the mid-1800s, Chris Hewitt, Director of Climate Services at the World Meteorological Organization, estimates that over the past decade, the next 10 years have been forecasted.
“With the forecast for the next five years, 1.5°C higher than the average industrial pre-life level, this will put more people at a serious risk of heat waves than ever before, unless people can better protect people from heat. We can also expect more severe wildfires because the hot atmosphere can cause more severe wildlife effects in Exeter.
Hewitt said the ice in the Arctic (which will continue to be 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world) will melt and the ocean will rise faster.
What often happens is that global temperatures rise like riding on an escalator, temporarily and natural El Niño weather cycles are like jumping around or falling on that escalator, scientists say. But lately, every time I jumped from El Nino, which added warming to the world, the planet wouldn't be too far behind.
“Record temperatures immediately became the new routine,” said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University.
& Copy 2025 Canadian Press
