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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS