This year is “virtually certain” to eclipse last year as the world’s warmest since records began, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said yesterday.
The data was released ahead of next week’s UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries would try to agree to a huge increase in funding to tackle climate change.
However, former US president Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election has dampened expectations for what the talks can achieve.
Photo: AFP
C3S said that from January to last month, the average global temperature had been so high that this year is sure to be the world’s hottest year — unless the temperature anomaly in the rest of the year plunged to near-zero.
“The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change,” C3S director Carlo Buontempo said.
“The climate is warming, generally. It’s warming in all continents, in all ocean basins,” he said.
“So we are bound to see those records being broken,” he added.
The scientists said that this year would also be the first year in which the planet is more than 1.5C° hotter than in the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the main cause of global warming.
ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne said she was not surprised by the milestone, and urged governments at COP29 to agree to stronger action to wean their economies off carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels.
“The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world,” she said.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5C°, to avoid its worst consequences.
The world has not breached that target — which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5C° over decades — but C3S now expects the world to exceed the Paris goal around 2030.
“It’s basically around the corner now,” Buontempo said.
Every fraction of temperature increase fuels extreme weather.
Last month, catastrophic flash floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record wildfires tore through Peru and flooding in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tonnes of rice, sending food prices skyrocketing.
In the US, Hurricane Milton was also worsened by human-caused climate change.
C3S’ records go back to 1940, which are cross-checked with global temperature records going back to 1850.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS