Last year was the world’s fifth-warmest year on record combined, and the past nine years were the nine warmest since pre-industrial times, as climate change continued to raise temperatures and promote extreme weather, US scientists said Thursday. Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest year since records began in 1880, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA said.
This was despite the presence of La Nina weather in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly. The world average global temperature is now 1.1 to 1.2°C higher than in pre-industrial times.
A NOAA-NASA analysis said temperatures are rising by more than 0.2°C per decade, putting the world on track to surpass the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C to avoid its most devastating consequences.
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies says “At the rate we’re going, it won’t take us more than two decades. And the only way we won’t do that is if we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere”.
Schmidt said he expects 2023 to be slightly warmer than 2022, due to a weaker La Nina cooling phenomenon.
“The global average temperature will be even higher in 10 years,” said ETH Zurich climatologist Sonia Seneviratne, adding that unless countries stop burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels, temperatures will continue to rise.
WEATHER EXTREMES
A changing climate has caused extreme weather fluctuations across the planet in 2022. Europe experienced its hottest summer on record, while floods killed 1,700 people and destroyed infrastructure in Pakistan, drought destroyed crops in Uganda, and forest fires hit countries in the Mediterranean.
Despite most of the world’s major emitters committing to eventually reduce their net emissions to zero, global CO2 emissions continue to rise. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations reached levels not seen on Earth for 3 million years last year, Schmidt said.
At this year’s COP28 climate conference, countries will formally assess their progress towards the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target – and the much faster emissions cuts needed to meet it.
COP28, hosted by the United Arab Emirates on Thursday, named the head of its state oil company as the conference’s president, raising concerns among activists and scientists about the influence of the fossil fuel industry on the negotiations. The NOAA-NASA findings are consistent with a separate analysis by scientists from the European Union, who this week ranked 2022 as the fifth warmest year on record.
