Prepare for several years of increasingly record-breaking heat, pushing the planet toward more hazardous, fiery, and uncomfortable extremes, according to forecasts from two leading global weather organizations.
The world has an 80% likelihood of surpassing a previous annual temperature record within the next five years. It’s also highly likely that global temperatures will again exceed the international benchmark established a decade ago, as per a five-year prediction issued on Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office.
Cornell University climate expert Natalie Mahowald, not involved in the forecasts, stated that while rising global temperatures might seem abstract, they result in more severe weather events in reality, such as stronger hurricanes, increased rainfall, and droughts. “So higher global temperatures mean more lives at risk,” she explained.
With every tenth of a degree the world warms from 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, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He was not part of the research.
And for the first time there’s a chance — albeit slight — that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.
There’s an 86% chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5 degrees and a 70% chance that the five years as a whole will average more than that global milestone, they figured.
The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centers of scientists.
Ten years ago, the same teams figured there was a similar remote chance — about 1% — that one of the upcoming years would exceed that critical 1.5 degree threshold and then it happened last year.
This year, a 2-degree Celsius above pre-industrial year enters the equation in a similar manner, something UK Met Office longer term predictions chief Adam Scaife and science scientist Leon Hermanson called “shocking.”
“It’s not something anyone wants to see, but that’s what the science is telling us,” Hermanson said. Two degrees of warming is the secondary threshold, the one considered less likely to break, set by the 2015 Paris agreement.
Technically, even though 2024 was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times, the Paris climate agreement’s threshold is for a 20-year time period, so it has not been exceeded.
Factoring in the past 10 years and forecasting the next 10 years, the world is now probably about 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter since the mid 1800s, World Meteorological Organization climate services director Chris Hewitt estimated.
“With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5C warmer than preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of heat. Also we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter atmosphere dries out the landscape,” said Richard Betts, head of climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the University of Exeter.
Ice in the Arctic — which will continue to warm 3.5 times faster than the rest of the world — will melt and seas will rise faster, Hewitt said.
What tends to happen is that global temperatures rise like riding on an escalator, with temporary and natural El Nino weather cycles acting like jumps up or down on that escalator, scientists said.
But lately, after each jump from an El Nino, which adds warming to the globe, the planet doesn’t go back down much, if at all.
“Record temperatures immediately become the new normal,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson.
