Glaciers melted at dramatic speed last year and saving them is effectively a lost cause, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday, as climate change indicators once again hit record highs.
The past eight years have been the warmest ever recorded, while concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide hit new peaks, the UN agency said in a report.
“Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record and the melting of some European glaciers was, literally, off the charts,” the organization said as it launched its annual climate overview.
Photo: AFP
Sea levels are also at a record high, rising by an average of 4.62mm per year between 2013 and last year — double the annual rate between 1993 and 2002.
Record high temperatures were also recorded in the oceans — where about 90 percent of the heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse gases ends up.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to cap global warming at “well below” 2°C above average levels measured between 1850 and 1900 — and 1.5°C if possible.
The global mean temperature last year was 1.15°C above the 1850-1900 average, the report said.
Record global mean temperatures over the past eight years came despite the cooling effects of a drawn-out La Nina weather phenomenon that stretched over nearly half that period.
The report said greenhouse gas concentrations reached new highs in 2021.
The concentration of carbon dioxide reached 415.7 parts per million globally, or 149 percent of the preindustrial (1750) level, while methane reached 262 percent and nitrous oxide hit 124 percent.
Data indicate they continued to increase last year.
WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas told a news conference that extreme weather caused by greenhouse gas emissions “may continue until the 2060s, independent of our success in in climate mitigation.”
“We have already emitted so much, especially CO2 in the atmosphere that this kind of phasing out of the negative trend takes several decades,” he said.
About 40 reference glaciers — those for which long-term observations exist — saw an average thickness loss of more than 1.3m from October 2021 to October last year — a loss much larger than the average over the past decade.
The cumulative thickness loss since 1970 amounts to almost 30m.
In Europe, the Alps smashed records for glacier melt due to a combination of little winter snow, an intrusion of Saharan dust in March last year and heat waves between May and early September last year.
“We have already lost the melting of the glaciers game, because we already have such a high concentration of CO2,” Taalas said.
In the Swiss Alps, “last summer we lost 6.2 percent of the glacier mass, which is the highest amount since records started.”
“This is serious,” he said, as the disappearance of the glaciers would limit freshwater supplies, and also harm transportation links if rivers become less navigable, calling it “a big risk for the future.”
“Many of these mountain glaciers will disappear, and also the shrinking of the antarctic and Greenland glaciers will continue for a long-term basis — unless we create a means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere,” he said.
Despite the report’s bad news, Taalas said there was cause for some optimism.
The means to battle climate change were becoming more affordable, he said, with renewable energy becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, while the world is developing better mitigation methods.
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