Paris Targets Unlikely to be Met With All Time High Greenhouse Emissions, Says WMO Report
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news article
Is the Paris Agreement Crumbling to Dust?
COP28 is around the corner, and rigorous discussions on climate change, ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and to adopt policies that can stop the globe from further warming will be at an all-time high, but if we look back and evaluate, we are way behind the target and the pace is painfully slow.
Summer 2023 broke temperature records globally by a wide margin and these record breaking temperatures continued through to September, making 2023, the hottest year ever in the ERA5 data record which goes back to 1940, according to the latest monthly bulletin from the Copernicus Climate Service (C3S).
According to a new report from the World meteorological Organization (WMO), the abundance of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere once again reached a new record last year and there is no end in sight to the rising trend.
“Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, thousands of pages of reports and dozens of climate conferences, we are still heading in the wrong direction,” said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas.
Global averaged concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas, in 2022 were a full 50% above the pre-industrial era for the first time, which continued to grow in 2023.
The global average sea surface temperature over the extra polar oceans was also the warmest on record for September, at 20.92°C, and the second warmest for any month, only behind August 2023, while El Niño conditions continued to develop over the equatorial Pacific.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S, states, “This makes me nervous about what is to come. When we combine all the data together, the global air temperature records, the global sea surface temperature records, the global sea ice records, all of these indications together really show us that our climate is changing at a very rapid pace and we have to adapt to the climate that we are facing right now,” Burgess said. “We can say with virtual certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record,” she added.
Burgess noted that temperatures have temporarily exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures for the past three months of 2023. “This doesn’t mean we have broken the Paris Agreement, but the reality is that the more days, weeks, or months we have above 1.5°C, the sooner we will exceed the Paris Agreement limit,” she said.
Reality Check
Change must come faster in the form of economy-wide, low-carbon development transformations, with a strong focus on energy. The coal, oil and gas extracted over the lifetime of producing and planned mines and fields would wipe out almost the whole remaining carbon budget for 2°C – and obliterate the 1.5°C budget many times over. Governments can’t keep pledging to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement and then greenlighting huge fossil fuels projects; this is throwing the global energy transition, and humanity’s future, into question. REAd further from the source
COP28 is around the corner, and rigorous discussions on climate change, ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and to adopt policies that can stop the globe from further warming will be at an all-time high, but if we look back and evaluate, we are way behind the target and the pace is painfully slow.
Summer 2023 broke temperature records globally by a wide margin and these record breaking temperatures continued through to September, making 2023, the hottest year ever in the ERA5 data record which goes back to 1940, according to the latest monthly bulletin from the Copernicus Climate Service (C3S).
According to a new report from the World meteorological Organization (WMO), the abundance of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere once again reached a new record last year and there is no end in sight to the rising trend.
“Despite decades of warnings from the scientific community, thousands of pages of reports and dozens of climate conferences, we are still heading in the wrong direction,” said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas.
Global averaged concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), the most important greenhouse gas, in 2022 were a full 50% above the pre-industrial era for the first time, which continued to grow in 2023.
The global average sea surface temperature over the extra polar oceans was also the warmest on record for September, at 20.92°C, and the second warmest for any month, only behind August 2023, while El Niño conditions continued to develop over the equatorial Pacific.
Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of C3S, states, “This makes me nervous about what is to come. When we combine all the data together, the global air temperature records, the global sea surface temperature records, the global sea ice records, all of these indications together really show us that our climate is changing at a very rapid pace and we have to adapt to the climate that we are facing right now,” Burgess said. “We can say with virtual certainty that 2023 will be the warmest year on record,” she added.
Burgess noted that temperatures have temporarily exceeded 1.5°C above preindustrial temperatures for the past three months of 2023. “This doesn’t mean we have broken the Paris Agreement, but the reality is that the more days, weeks, or months we have above 1.5°C, the sooner we will exceed the Paris Agreement limit,” she said.
Reality Check
Change must come faster in the form of economy-wide, low-carbon development transformations, with a strong focus on energy. The coal, oil and gas extracted over the lifetime of producing and planned mines and fields would wipe out almost the whole remaining carbon budget for 2°C – and obliterate the 1.5°C budget many times over. Governments can’t keep pledging to cut emissions under the Paris Agreement and then greenlighting huge fossil fuels projects; this is throwing the global energy transition, and humanity’s future, into question. REAd further from the source
Keywords
greenhouse gases
food security
decision making
land use