WASHINGTON — Two of the world’s top weather institutes predict that Earth will see several years of even more record-breaking heat, pushing it to more lethal, scorching, and uncomfortable extremes.
According to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Kingdom Meteorological Office, the world has an 80% chance of breaking another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it is even more likely that the world will exceed the international temperature threshold set ten years ago.
“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, more precipitation, droughts,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University who was not involved in the calculations but believed they made logic. “So higher global mean temperatures translates to more lives lost.”
With every tenth of a degree, the earth warms due to human-caused climate change. “We will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves, but also droughts, floods, fires, and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” emailed Johan Rockstrom, head of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. He was not involved in the research.
And, for the first time, there is a slim chance that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature will exceed the Paris climate agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and reach a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.
They calculated that there is an 86% possibility that one of the next five years will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius and a 70% chance that the five years will average hotter than that global milestone.
The estimations are based on more than 200 computer simulations conducted by ten global scientific centres.
Ten years ago, the same teams estimated that there was a comparable remote probability — approximately 1% — that one of the coming years would exceed the vital 1.5 degree threshold, which occurred last year. This year, a 2-degree Celsius increase over the pre-industrial year enters the equation in a similar fashion, which UK Met Office longer-term projections chief Adam Scaife and science scientist Leon Hermanson describe as “shocking.”
“It’s not something anyone wants to see, but that’s what the science is telling us,” Hermanson told me. The secondary barrier, set by the 2015 Paris agreement, is two degrees Celsius of warming, which is thought to be less likely to be exceeded.
Technically, even though 2024 was 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times, the Paris climate agreement’s threshold is for a 20-year period and hence has not been exceeded. According to World Meteorological Organisation climate services director Chris Hewitt, the world is presently probably approximately 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than it was in the mid-1800s, taking into account the previous decade and estimating the future ten years.
“With the next five years expected to be more than 1.5C higher than preindustrial levels on average, more people than ever will be at danger of catastrophic heat waves, resulting in more deaths and serious health consequences unless people are better shielded from the effects of heat. Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter, also predicted more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries up the landscape.
According to Hewitt, ice in the Arctic will melt and sea levels will rise faster as the region continues to warm 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world.
Global temperatures typically climb like an escalator, with transient and natural El Nino weather cycles serving as jumps up or down that escalator, according to scientists. However, following each surge from an El Nino, which increases to global warming, the planet hasn’t cooled much, if at all.
“Record temperatures immediately become the new normal,” stated Stanford University climate expert Rob Jackson.
