UNITED STATES NEWS

The likelihood that Earth briefly hits key warming threshold grows bigger and closer, UN forecasts

May 17, 2023, 5:00 PM | Updated: May 18, 2023, 8:10 am

A demonstrator shows her hands reading "1.5 to survive" at a protest advocating for the warming goa...

A demonstrator shows her hands reading "1.5 to survive" at a protest advocating for the warming goal at the COP27 U.N. Climate Summit, Nov. 16, 2022, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. There’s a two-out-of-three chance within the next five years that the world will temporarily reach the internationally accepted global temperature threshold for limiting the worst effects of climate change, a new World Meteorological Organization report forecasts on Wednesday, May 17, 2023. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

(AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

There’s a two-out-of-three chance that the world will temporarily hit a key warming limit within the next five years, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.

But it likely would only be a fleeting and less worrisome flirtation with the internationally agreed upon temperature threshold. Scientists expect a temporary burst of heat from El Nino — a naturally-occurring weather phenomenon — to supercharge human-caused warming from the burning of coal, oil and gas to new heights. Temperatures are expected to then slip back down a bit.

The World Meteorological Organization forecasts a 66% likelihood that between now and 2027, the globe will have a year that averages 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the mid 19th century.

That number is critical because the 2015 Paris climate agreement set 1.5 degrees Celsius as a global guardrail in atmospheric warming, with countries pledging to try to prevent that much long-term warming if possible.

Scientists in a special 2018 United Nations report said going past that point would be drastically and dangerously different with more death, destruction and damage to global ecosystems.

“It won’t be this year probably. Maybe it’ll be next year or the year after” that a year averages 1.5 degrees Celsius, said report lead author Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom’s Met Office.

But climate scientists said what’s likely to happen in the next five years isn’t the same as failing the global goal.

“This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5 C level specified in the Paris Agreement which refers to long-term warming over many years. However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5 C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

“We haven’t been able to limit the warming so far and we are still moving in the wrong, wrong direction,” Taalas said at a Wednesday press conference.

Hermanson cautioned that “a single year doesn’t really mean anything.” Scientists usually use 30-year averages.

Those 66% odds of a single year hitting that threshold in five years have increased from 48% last year40% the year before, 20% in 2020 and 10% about a decade ago. The WMO report is based on calculations by 11 different climate science centers across the globe.

The world has been inching closer to the 1.5-degree threshold due to human-caused climate change for years. The temporary warming of this year’s expected El Nino — which starts with a warming of parts of the central Pacific Ocean and then sloshes across the globe — makes it “possible for us to see a single year exceeding 1.5 C a full decade before the long-term average,” said climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who wasn’t part of the WMO report.

“We don’t expect the longer-term average to pass 1.5 C until the early-to-mid 2030s,” Hausfather said in an email.

But each year at or near 1.5 matters.

“We see this report as more of a barometer of how we’re getting close, because the closer you get to the threshold, the more noise bumping up and down is going to bump you over the threshold randomly,” Hermanson said in an interview. And he said the more random bumps over the mark occur, the closer the world actually gets to the threshold.

Key in all this is the El Nino cycle. The world is coming off a record-tying triple dip La Nina — three straight years of El Nino’s cooler cousin restraining the human-caused warming climb — and is on the verge of an El Nino that some scientists predict will be strong.

The La Nina somewhat flattened the trend of human-caused warming so that the world hasn’t broken the annual temperature mark since 2016, during the last El Nino, a super-sized one, Hermanson said.

And that means a 98% chance of breaking the 2016 annual global temperature record between now and 2027, the report said. There’s also a 98% chance that the next five years will be the hottest five years on record, the report said.

Because of the shift from La Nina to El Nino “where there were floods before, there will be droughts and where there were droughts before there might be floods,” Hermanson said.

The report warned that the Amazon will be abnormally dry for a good part of the next five years while the Sahel part of Africa — the transition zone between the Sahara on the north and the savannas to the south — will be wetter.

That’s “one of the positive things coming out of this forecast,” Hermanson said. “It’s not all doom-and-gloom and heat waves.”

University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said reports like this put too much emphasis on global surface temperature, which varies with the El Nino cycle, even though it is climbing upward in the long term.

The real concern is the deep water of oceans, which absorb an overwhelming majority of the world’s human-caused warming, leading to a steady rise in ocean heat content and new records set regularly.

“I think it’s important to realize that if we pass 1.5 degrees it’s not a reason to give up,” Hermanson said at a Wednesday news conference. “We have to continue working out how much we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases as much as possible, even after that, because it will make a difference.”

United States News

Sen. Fred Mills asks a question to members of The Louisiana Department of Children and Family Servi...

Associated Press

Louisiana Senate passes bill banning gender-affirming car for transgender youths

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A controversial bill — that at one point had been presumed dead — banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths in Louisiana was passed by the Senate on Monday and is likely to reach the governor’s desk in the coming days. The bill, which passed in the Senate mainly along […]

16 hours ago

Ted Henifin, the interim third-party manager appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to help fi...

Associated Press

Mississippi’s capital only collects 56% of fees from its struggling water system

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Mississippi’s capital is collecting only a little more than half of the money it bills for water use, far below the rate at which most American cities obtain such fees, Jackson’s federally appointed water manager said Monday. Ted Henifin, appointed in November by a federal court to help improve Jackson’s troubled […]

16 hours ago

Associated Press

Chinese ex-official’s wife says alleged repatriation pressure turned her life in US ‘upside-down’

NEW YORK (AP) — A former Chinese official and his wife had left their homeland and kept their U.S. address private. Yet eight years later, two strangers were banging on their New Jersey front door and twisting the handle, the wife testified in a U.S. court Monday. When the men left and Liu Fang opened […]

16 hours ago

Associated Press

Ex-guard at NYC federal building indicted in sex assault of asylum seeker

NEW YORK (AP) — An asylum seeker was sexually assaulted by an armed guard at a federal building in New York City where the FBI has its offices, according to an indictment unsealed Monday. Jimmy Solano-Arias, 42, of the Bronx, was charged in Manhattan federal court with deprivation of rights under color of law involving […]

16 hours ago

Associated Press

CNN chief apologizes to employees for distracting from work

NEW YORK (AP) — Chris Licht, the embattled chief executive of CNN, apologized to network employees on Monday for distracting from their work and promised to “fight like hell” to earn their trust amid criticism of his year at the helm. Licht’s tenure hit a low point last week with publication of a lengthy, damaging […]

16 hours ago

Associated Press

Dozens evacuated from small cruise ship in Alaska after engine room fire

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A fire in the engine room of a small cruise ship in Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve prompted the evacuation of dozens of passengers and crew on Monday. No injuries were reported, and the fire was extinguished, the U.S. Coast Guard said. The fire on board the Wilderness Discoverer […]

16 hours ago

Sponsored Articles

...

Desert Institute for Spine Care

Spinal fusion surgery has come a long way, despite misconceptions

As Dr. Justin Field of the Desert Institute for Spine Care explained, “we've come a long way over the last couple of decades.”

(Desert Institute for Spine Care in Arizona Photo)...

Desert Institute for Spine Care in Arizona

5 common causes for chronic neck pain

Neck pain can debilitate one’s daily routine, yet 80% of people experience it in their lives and 20%-50% deal with it annually.

(Photo by Michael Matthey/picture alliance via Getty Images)...

Cox Communications

Valley Boys & Girls Club uses esports to help kids make healthy choices

KTAR’s Community Spotlight focuses on the Boys & Girls Club of the Valley and the work to incorporate esports into children's lives.

The likelihood that Earth briefly hits key warming threshold grows bigger and closer, UN forecasts