WASHINGTON (AP) — Month after month, global temperatures break new records. Meanwhile, scientists and policymakers warn of the growing likelihood that the planet will soon surpass the warming target set at the 2015 Paris climate negotiations.
Understanding the evolution of climate extremes can be a challenge for some. Here’s a look at what scientists are saying.
WHAT CLIMATE RECORDS HAVE BEEN BROKEN RECENTLY?
The European Union’s climate observation agency, Copernicus, declared last month that it was the hottest May on record, marking the 12th consecutive monthly record. Separately, the World Meteorological Organization has estimated that there is almost a one in two chance that average global temperatures from 2024 to 2028 will exceed the expected warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times that was agreed at the Paris talks.
And one more: the Earth warmed at a slightly faster rate in 2023 than in 2022, determined a group of 57 scientists in a report published in the journal Earth System Science Data.
ARE CLIMATE SCIENTISTS SURPRISED?
In truth. Many climate scientists say warming trends follow what they have studied and predicted based on the accumulation of carbon dioxide resulting from increased use of fossil fuels.
In 2023, the levels of these heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere has reached historic highs, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carbon dioxide, in particular, which is the most abundant and important of the greenhouse gases produced by human activity, increased in 2023 by the third-largest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA said.
WHAT DO BROKEN RECORDS MEAN FOR HUMANS?
More suffering. Human-induced climate change has brought wild climate swingsincreasingly unpredictable storms and heat waves that linger in a specific area for long periods of time.
One Asian heat wave This spring forced the closure of schools in the Philippines, killed people in Thailand and broke records there and in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldives and Myanmar. Weeks of heatwaves in parts of India last month also closed schools and killed people.
Life won’t end if temperatures exceed the 1.5-degree limit, but things will get worse, scientists say. Previous UN Studies show that massive changes in Earth’s ecosystem are most likely to begin between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius of warming, including the eventual loss of the planet’s coral reefs, Arctic sea ice, some plant and animal species – along with with even worse extreme weather events that kill people and damage infrastructure.
“The Paris threshold is not a magic number. Reaching this level of warming above a multi-year average will not cause a noticeable increase in the impacts we are already witnessing,” said Jennifer Francis, a scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Massachusetts.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
Climate scientists are convinced that the use of fossil fuels must be phased out to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. The burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal – is the main contributor to global warming caused by human activity.
“Until greenhouse gas concentrations stabilize, we will continue to break temperature records, along with increasingly frequent and intense extreme weather events,” Francis said.
Renewable energy has been growing rapidly, but needs to grow even faster. Efficiencies are being studied, developed, and implemented across the economy—in the forms we heat houses and buildingsfor example, cook our food It is make cement – but scientists say the need to adapt is urgent.
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