Five year climate forecast projects more record-breaking heat

Euronews

7 days ago

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's an 80 per cent chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it's even more probable that the world will 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 wasn't 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),' emailed Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He was not part of the research.
For the first time there's also 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 and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.
There's an 86 per cent chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5 degrees and a 70 per cent 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 per cent - that one of the upcoming years would exceed that critical 1.5 degree threshold. 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 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.
When we think of rewilding cities, we usually think of adding more greenery. Two-thirds of urban conservation programmes do focus exclusively on vegetation, according to a new review of thousands of scientific papers, but there's another side to this story.
From beavers back swimming in London's rivers after 400 years, to falcons nesting in American high-rises, there are also an increasing number of successful projects returning animals to cities.
A new study from the University of Sydney illustrates the benefits of these rewilding projects for city-dwellers as well as global biodiversity.
'They reconnect people with nature - an antidote to what researchers call nature deficit disorder,' says Dr Patrick Finnerty from the University's Faculty of Science, lead author of the global literature review published Sunday in the journal Bioscience.
'In today's urban environments, many children can name hundreds of brands but often not a single native bird or mammal.
'Bringing wildlife back into daily life improves mental health, fosters environmental stewardship, and reminds us that nature isn't something 'out there',' he adds.
Of the 2,800 scientific papers that Dr Finnerty and his team reviewed - on reintroducing species to areas where they once thrived - fewer than one per cent involved returning terrestrial fauna to cities.
Animal rewilding tends to happen far from urban landscapes, despite biodiversity loss being so pronounced in cities.
Other success stories include leopard frogs being restored to Las Vegas, howler monkeys breeding in Rio de Janeiro, and the reintroduction of the oriental pied hornbill to its historical range in Singapore.
In Australia, platypus populations are now growing on Sydney's periphery.
By 2050, around 70 per cent of the world's population of 10 billion people is expected to live in urban areas - a 20 per cent increase from today. This will necessitate a rapid growth of land-use change, especially in Africa and Asia.
To stop urban sprawl steamrolling over natural habitats, the researchers are calling for urban rewilding to be a key part of broader ecological restoration initiatives.
The authors say successful urban rewilding requires careful planning, community involvement, and addressing the threats that caused local extinctions in the first place.
For example, the recent reintroduction of small mammals, including the eastern pygmy possum, into an urban bushland reserve bordering housing in Sydney required serious invasive predator control efforts to help ensure the project's success.
"By integrating wildlife into urban landscapes, we have a unique opportunity to shape healthier and more resilient cities for future generations," says Dr Finnerty.