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National Observer
4 days ago
- Science
- National Observer
Burning through the guardrails
Less than one year ago, the world's top weather experts hosted a forum called 'Keeping 1.5 Alive' at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. You've got to imagine it was the comms team and not the scientists that picked the title. The WMO issued its medium-term forecast this week and it shows the Earth will cross that symbolic threshold in two years. The organization forecasts that temperatures will stay near or above record levels for the rest of this decade. And it estimates a 70 per cent probability that the entire five-year average will exceed 1.5 C above pre-industrial temperatures. The timeline just keeps getting tighter. Only seven years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected the world wouldn't heat beyond 1.5 C until the 2040s. Two years ago, the IPCC authors shifted the projection to the mid-2030s. Now, we're on the doorstep. Just 10 years ago, the nations of the world adopted the Paris Agreement, setting guardrails to keep global temperatures 'well below 2 C above pre-industrial levels,' and pledging 'efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 C.' They didn't define the guardrails more precisely in the treaty, but the general presumption is that they refer to a temperature average, measured over many years. Then, last year, we burned enough fossil fuels to cook our poor planet above 1.5 C for a calendar year, for the first time. But the policy wonks and other sticklers warned against alarmism. One year is not a long-term average, they cautioned — the Paris target was still alive. Even before the Paris Agreement, '1.5 to stay alive' had become a rallying cry from island nations and other especially vulnerable countries. Chants of 'keep 1.5 alive' thundered from climate protests. Scientists itemized in painful, painstaking detail how that level of warming would impact natural ecosystems, food, weather, health and habitability. Only seven years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected the world wouldn't heat beyond 1.5 C until the 2040s. Two years ago, the IPCC authors shifted the projection to the mid-2030s. Now, we're on the doorstep. It was always a stretch goal. The nations of the world have been far quicker to adopt targets than to tackle fossil fuel burning. And the WMO's new forecast means any faint hope is mathematically implausible. 'There is no way, barring geoengineering, to prevent global temperatures from going over 1.5 degrees,' says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. Considering the fact that global temperatures will keep rising in the 2030s and have already been above 1.5 C for most of the past two years, 2027 will probably be the year the long-term temperature average exceeds 1.5 C. For those of you who are statistically inclined, there was another startling finding from the WMO update. For the first time, supercomputers spat out a probability (an 'exceptionally unlikely' one) of an entire year above 2 C in the next five years. 'It is shocking that 2 C is plausible,' said Adam Scaife of the UK Met Office. 'It has come out as only one per cent (probability) in the next five years, but the probability will increase as the climate warms.' All these forecasts and figures become a lot less abstract on the ground. Both Manitoba and Saskatchewan declared province-wide states of emergency this week as wildfires rage. Over 17,000 people have fled their homes in Manitoba alone. 'That is a sign of a changing climate that we are going to have to adapt to,' warned Premier Wab Kinew. Grand Chief Kyra Wilson of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said the wildfires highlight the injustice of climate impacts on Indigenous communities. 'Our First Nations are strong and resilient, but they should not have to face these growing climate threats alone,' Wilson said. In Switzerland, this week's climate evacuations were driven by ice, not fire. The village of Blatten was almost completely buried by nine million tonnes of ice, rock and mud as temperatures thawed out the permafrost and the Birch Glacier collapsed. Glaciers in Switzerland have lost about 40 per cent of their volume since 2000 and the loss is accelerating. 'The last few years have been particularly bad,' said Daniel Farinotti, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich. 'In 2022 and 2023 alone, 10 per cent of Switzerland's glacial ice was lost due to record-high summer temperatures.' Melting glaciers can collapse catastrophically — as happened to Blatten — or melt into lakes that later burst through their natural dams. These 'glacial lake outburst floods' (GLOFs) are likened to inland tsunamis and have been happening in the Himalayas and Andes without the drone footage and media coverage of Blatten. Fifteen million people are estimated to be at risk from catastrophic GLOFs. Whether these disasters arrive through fire or ice, the obvious common thread is our overheating planet. But another is the role of forecasters. The residents of Blatten and all their animals were evacuated more than a week before the glacier collapse, thanks to advance warnings from glaciologists. Many thousands of people sheltering in wildfire evacuation centres are distraught and fearful, but they got to safety because they heeded the fire and weather forecasters. It's one of humanity's superpowers — this capacity to forecast into the future and act in the present — and it's one we desperately need, as we burn through the guardrails and the timelines tighten.
Boston Globe
29-05-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Earth could cross a key climate threshold in two years. Here's why it matters.
The accelerated timeline is due to higher-than-expected temperatures over the past few years, diminishing air pollution that cooled the Earth, and greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise globally, despite the growth of renewable energy. And it means that irreversible tipping points in the climate system — such as the melting of Arctic ice sheets or the wide-scale collapse of coral reefs — are closer at hand than scientists previously believed. Advertisement The WMO report predicted five more years of sky-high temperatures — which, combined with hotter conditions driven by the El Niño weather pattern, mean that the planet is poised to officially warm 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over a sustained period by 2027. 'There is no way, barring geoengineering, to prevent global temperatures from going over 1.5 degrees,' said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at the payments company Stripe. Geoengineering refers to deliberately cooling the planet, for example by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere — an idea that is hotly debated. Nearly a decade ago, delegates from more than 190 nations agreed in Paris to pursue 'efforts to limit the temperature increase' to 1.5 degrees Celsius, after small-island nations protested that higher temperatures would sink their land beneath rising waves. Advertisement While there is no official definition, most scientists and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change understand the goal to be a long-term average temperature, over 20 or 30 years. (In a single year, temperatures could spike because of El Niño or other temporary factors.) That's why, when the world passed the first 12-month period of temperatures over 1.5 degrees Celsius in February 2024, scientists warned that this didn't mean the end of the target. But now, with the WMO's new predictions, even that small hope has slipped away. According to the new analysis, it is likely that the next five years clock in, on average, at over 1.5 degrees Celsius. Combined with the past couple of hot years — and increasing temperatures expected after 2030 — that means 2027 is likely to be the first year where that long-term average temperature is over the limit, Hausfather said. Since the 2015 Paris agreement, 1.5 degrees Celsius has been a kind of lodestar for the climate movement. Protesters have chanted 'Keep 1.5 alive' outside global climate meetings. Scientists have outlined how that level of warming will drive infectious diseases, destroy crops, and fuel weather disasters. Still, the goal was always a stretch. In the accord, nations agreed to hold temperatures 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to hold them to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But even at the time, some scientists and experts privately worried that — given the difficulty of transforming the energy system — the more ambitious target would prove impossible. 'There's tremendous inertia in the industrial system,' said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California San Diego, who has questioned the feasibility of the goal since before the Paris agreement. 'It doesn't change quickly.' Advertisement A pumpjack dips its head to extract oil in a basin north of Helper, Utah. Rick Bowmer/Associated Press Although renewables have grown dramatically over the past decade, they still make up just about a third of the global energy mix. Even as wind, solar, and batteries grow on the grid, the world is also consuming more electricity than ever before. Missing the target will mark the end of a hopeful phase in the world's battle against climate change — and the beginning of a period of uncertainty about what comes next. At the same time, humanity will face mounting weather extremes, including deadly heat waves that compound in strength for each tenth of a degree of warming. It also places policymakers and negotiators who have tried to rally support for slashing planet-warming emissions in an uncomfortable situation. UN Secretary General António Guterres, for example, has claimed that the 1.5-degree goal is 'on life support' and 'will soon be dead.' At some point soon, nations will have to acknowledge that failure — and devise a new goal. 'You could imagine governments saying, 'Hey, 1.5 is not going to be feasible, but here's what we're going to do, and here's where we're going to tighten the efforts,'' said Victor. 'That's one approach. And another approach would just be to say give up.' Some countries and scientists have also put their faith behind a concept called 'overshoot' — where the world could pass 1.5 degrees Celsius, then later on remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. But many researchers warn that if countries cannot even spend the money to build out renewables and batteries, removing CO2 from the sky could be a pipe dream. Advertisement 'I'm personally very skeptical about our willingness to spend tens of trillions of dollars on dealing with overshoot,' Hausfather said. Nations could redirect their attention to the Paris agreement's less ambitious goal — holding temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. That goal is more feasible, but at the moment still unlikely. The planet is currently on pace for something closer to 2.5 degrees Celsius. 'It's just the longer we wait, the harder it's going to be,' Hausfather said. 'After another decade of doing nothing, we're going to talk about the 2-degree target much like we talk about the 1.5-degree target.'
Washington Post
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
Earth will cross a key climate threshold in two years. Here's why it matters.
Seven years ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the world wouldn't warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels until 2040. Then two years ago, the group predicted the world would pass that threshold between 2030 and 2035. Now, new data from the World Meteorological Organization released Wednesday indicates that the Earth will cross this point in just two years. The accelerated timeline is due to higher-than-expected temperatures over the past few years, diminishing air pollution that cooled the Earth, and greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise globally despite the growth of renewable energy. And it means that irreversible tipping points in the climate system — like the melting of Arctic ice sheets or the wide-scale collapse of coral reefs — are closer at hand than scientists previously believed. The WMO report predicted five more years of sky-high temperatures — which, combined with hotter conditions driven by the El Niño weather pattern, mean that the planet is poised to officially warm 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over a sustained period by 2027. 'There is no way, barring geoengineering, to prevent global temperatures from going over 1.5 degrees,' said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at the payments company Stripe. Geoengineering refers to deliberately cooling the planet, for example by injecting aerosols into the atmosphere — a practice that is hotly debated. Nearly a decade ago, delegates from more than 190 nations agreed in Paris to pursue 'efforts to limit the temperature increase' to 1.5 degrees Celsius, after small-island nations protested that higher temperatures would sink their land beneath rising waves. While there is no official definition, most scientists and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change understand the goal to be a long-term average temperature, over 20 or 30 years. (In a single year, temperatures could spike because of El Niño or other temporary factors.) That's why, when the world passed the first 12-month period of temperatures over 1.5 degrees Celsius in February 2024, scientists warned that this didn't mean the end of the target. But now, with the WMO's new predictions, even that small hope has slipped away. According to the new analysis, it is likely that the next five years clock in, on average, at over 1.5 degrees Celsius. Combined with the past couple of hot years — and increasing temperatures expected after 2030 — that means 2027 is likely to be the first year where that long-term average temperature is over the limit, Hausfather said. Since the 2015 Paris agreement, 1.5 degrees Celsius has been a kind of lodestar for the climate movement. Protesters have chanted 'Keep 1.5 alive' outside global climate meetings. Scientists have outlined how that level of warming will drive infectious diseases, destroy crops and fuel weather disasters. Still, the goal was always a stretch. In the accord, nations agreed to hold temperatures 'well below' 2 degrees Celsius and pursue efforts to hold them to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But even at the time, some scientists and experts privately worried that — given the difficulty of transforming the energy system — the more ambitious target would prove impossible. 'There's tremendous inertia in the industrial system,' said David Victor, a professor of public policy at the University of California at San Diego, who has questioned the feasibility of the goal since before the Paris agreement. 'It doesn't change quickly.' Although renewables have grown dramatically over the past decade, they still make up just about a third of the global energy mix. Even as wind, solar and batteries grow on the grid, the world is also consuming more electricity than ever before. Missing the target will mark the end of a hopeful phase in the world's battle against climate change — and the beginning of a period of uncertainty about what comes next. At the same time, humanity will face mounting weather extremes, including deadly heat waves that compound in strength for each tenth of a degree of warming. It also places policymakers and negotiators who have tried to rally support for slashing planet-warming emissions in an uncomfortable situation. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, for example, has claimed that the 1.5-degree goal is 'on life support' and 'will soon be dead.' At some point soon, nations will have to acknowledge that failure — and devise a new goal. 'You could imagine governments saying, 'Hey, 1.5 is not going to be feasible, but here's what we're going to do, and here's where we're going to tighten the efforts,'' said Victor. 'That's one approach. And another approach would just be to say give up.' Some countries and scientists have also put their faith behind a concept called 'overshoot' — where the world could pass 1.5 degrees Celsius, then later on remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. But many researchers warn that if countries cannot even spend the money to build out renewables and batteries, removing CO2 from the sky could be a pipe dream. 'I'm personally very skeptical about our willingness to spend tens of trillions of dollars on dealing with overshoot,' Hausfather said. Nations could redirect their attention to the Paris agreement's less ambitious goal — holding temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. That goal is more feasible, but at the moment still unlikely. The planet is currently on pace for something closer to 2.5 degrees Celsius. 'It's just the longer we wait, the harder it's going to be,' Hausfather said. 'After another decade of doing nothing, we're going to talk about the 2-degree target much like we talk about the 1.5-degree target.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
2025 Could Be Earth's Second Warmest Year Behind 2024, Report Says
April was Earth's second warmest on record and that's keeping 2025 on a pace to finish slightly behind 2024 for the planet's record warmest year, according to just-released data. April Again: April 2025's globally average temperature was 1.08 degrees Fahrenheit above average, only 0.13 degrees cooler than the record warmest April in 2024, according to a report released Thursday by the European Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). Pacing Only Behind Last Year: With four months in the books, 2025 is pacing to be the planet's second warmest year on record, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather estimated in a post on X. C3S calculated Earth had its warmest January, third warmest February and second warmest March, in addition to the second warmest April in 2025. 2024 was the planet's warmest year in records dating to the late 19th century, according to both NOAA and NASA. (For even more granular weather data tracking in your area, view your 15-minute details forecast in our Premium Pro experience.) Above The Threshold? April 2025 was the 21st in the last 22 months in which global temperatures were more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels, according to the C3S. The most recent 12-month period through April was also more than 2.7-degrees above late 19th-century temperatures. That doesn't necessarily mean we've broken above the 2.7 degree limit agreed upon in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. According to climate scientists, that would require that threshold to be topped for over a decade. But they also stress it means we're closer to that threshold than ever April was the warmest on record in the United Arab Emirates, and was the second warmest in China and Pakistan. On April 30, Athenry, Ireland, set the republic's all-time April record high of 25.9 degrees Celsius (78.6 degrees Fahrenheit). In the U.S., it was the hottest April on record in Asheville, Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, as well as Shreveport, Louisiana, according to the Southeast Regional Climate Center. Oceans also warm: Global ocean temperatures were also the second highest of any April on record, C3S found. Among patches of ocean record warm in April included most areas near Australia, the Philippine Sea, the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, the northeast Atlantic Ocean near Ireland, the U.K. and Scandinavia, and the southwestern Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. Despite all that, 2025's April ocean warmth paled in comparison to the off-the-charts ocean warmth in April 2024, which included both record tropical Atlantic warmth and an El Niño, the periodic warming of water in the equatorial eastern and central Pacific Ocean. NOAA, NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency are scheduled to issue their April global reports in the coming days. Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on X (formerly Twitter), Threads, Facebook and Bluesky.
Axios
08-05-2025
- Science
- Axios
April temperatures continue Earth's warm 2025
Earth just had its second-warmest April in temperature records that date back to the 1800s, trailing only last year, per the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. Why it matters: These monthly analyses offer fresh signs of a warming planet from one of the major stewards of global climate data. With four months of data in, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather posted that 2025 is likely to be the world's second-warmest on record. Driving the news: Last month was 1.51°C above the estimated 1850-1900 average that Copernicus uses to define the pre-industrial era, per the comprehensive ERA5 dataset they use. And it was the 21st month in the last 22 months with average air temperatures was more than 1.5°C — a key Paris Agreement benchmark — above that era. The bottom line:"Continuous climate monitoring is an essential tool for understanding and responding to the ongoing changes of our climate system," said Samantha Burgess, a top Copernicus official, in a statement.
