Killer heat ahead: new global forecast warns of deadly climate extremes

South China Morning Post

28-05-2025

Get ready for several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extremes, two of the world's top weather agencies forecast.
There was an 80 per cent chance the world would break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and was even more probable that the world would again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago, according to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office.
'Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts,' said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who was not part of the calculations but said they made sense. 'So higher global mean temperatures translates to more lives lost.'
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),' Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, wrote in an email. He was not part of the research.
The world's average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees above the 1850-1900 average for the first time in 2024. File photo: AP
And for the first time there was a chance - albeit slight - that before the end of the decade, the world's annual temperature would shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.
There was an 86 per cent chance that one of the next five years would pass 1.5 degrees and a 70 per cent chance that the five years as a whole would average more than that global milestone, they figured.