by In the past year alone, human activities – such as burning coal for cheap power – warmed our planet by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.34 Fahrenheit), according to a new report. If we continue pumping heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at our current rate, scientists say we have about five years before we drive global warming above the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) set by The Paris Agreement.
Once again, the results show that human-driven global warming continues to heat the planet – even though climate action has slightly slowed the overall rise in greenhouse gas emissions. “Global temperatures are still going in the wrong direction and faster than ever,” Piers Forsterwho is a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in the UK, said in a statement available at the university, whose scientists are in charge of the new report.
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Last year, from June to December, each month set a global heat record for its respective history. For example, July 2023 was the warmest July on record dating back to the late 1800s. Those extreme temperatures destroyed many regions around the world, melting ice in the Antarctic unmatched lows fueling Canada’s worst wildfire season ever. The extreme heat was clearly being driven by heat-trapping gases emitted when companies burn fossil fuels to generate power.
A recurring weather pattern called El Nino, which is linked to warmer temperatures on average, although scientists say it has been strengthening over the past 60 years due to global warming. And, again, human activities are the main driver of global warming — what we are seeing in terms of climate change, scientists have said, is not a healthy natural phenomenon for our planet.
“Last year, when observed temperature records were broken, these natural factors were temporarily contributing about 10 percent to long-term warming,” Forster said in the news release. “The devastation caused by wildfires, drought, floods and heat waves that the world saw in 2023 cannot be the new normal.”
Over the past decade, from 2014 to 2023, temperatures rose by 1.19 degrees Celsius (2.1 Fahrenheit) – up from the 1.14 degrees Celsius (2 Fahrenheit) seen from 2013 to 2022, according to the new report, published on Tuesday (June ). 4) and under the supervision of over 50 scientists including Forster. A full version of the report can be seen in the journal Earth System Science Data.
The scientists say that global warming over the past decade has also contributed to reduced sulfur emissions from the commercial shipping industry, which has, since 2020, changed its fuel composition to limit sulfur in line with regulations from the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Those regulations were aimed at — and succeeded in — reducing air pollution from ships. That may be a positive thing, but not in all respects. Sulfur is known to have a cooling effect on the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. Therefore, due to the accelerated phase-out of sulfur in marine fuel starting in 2020, there were fewer sulfur particles in the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
Global warming due to this IMO regulation is equivalent to tackling about two additional years of greenhouse gas emissions at current rates, which may not fundamentally change where the world is ahead in terms of warming by 2050, but “it gets harder to do. to limit warming to 1.5C over the next few decades,” Forster and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley Earth wrote in Carbon Brief last year.
The latest findings are also reflected in the multiple reports issued this year. In February, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that average global temperatures last year rose by 1.48 degrees Celsius, or 2.66 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the end of the 19th century – making 2023 the hottest year overall on record. An analysis by scientists at NASA similarly found that the world’s temperature last year was about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.16 Fahrenheit) warmer than pre-industrial levels.
Although each organization uses slightly different methods to arrive at these numbers, they all agree that 2023 was the hottest on our planet in a century and a half, and possibly in the last 2,000 years.
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“It’s so clear that we should do as much as possible, as soon as possible,” Jan Esper, a climate scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany, told reporters during a briefing last month. “I’m worried about global warming – it’s one of the biggest threats out there.”
This November, world leaders will gather for the United Nations COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan for the latest round of negotiations aimed at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial levels.
