Geneva, May 10 (BNA): The world is approaching the threshold of warming that international agreements are trying to prevent, with a roughly 50-50 chance that the Earth will temporarily reach this temperature mark over the next five years, teams of meteorologists across the world forecast.
As man-made climate change continues, there is a 48% chance that the globe will average 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels in the late 19th century at least once between now and 2026, which is bright red; A sign in the climate change negotiations and science, a team from 11 different forecast centers for the World Meteorological Organization predicted late Monday.
The possibilities increase with the thermometer. Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at nearly 40% and a decade ago they were just 10%, the AP reports.
The team, coordinated by the UK Met Office, said in their general five-year forecast that there is a 93% chance the world will set a record in the hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there is a 93% chance of that happening. The five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record. Forecasters are also forecasting that a devastating massive, fire-prone drought will continue in the southwestern United States.
“We will see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said Leon Hermanson, chief scientist at the UK Met Office, who coordinated the report.
This forecast is a big picture of global and regional climate predictions on an annual and seasonal time scale based on long-term averages and the latest computer simulations. They differ from accurate weather forecasts that predict how hot or humid a particular day will be in certain places.
But even if the world reaches this mark 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century — that is very different from the global threshold first set by international negotiators at the 2015 Paris Agreement. In 2018, a major United Nations scientific report predicted dramatic and dangerous effects for people and the world if warming exceeded 1.5 degrees.
Several scientists have said that the global 1.5 degree threshold is about the world being warm not for one year, but over 20 or 30 years. This is not what the report expects. Hermansson said meteorologists can only tell if Earth reaches that rate in years, maybe a decade or two, after it’s actually reached because it’s a long-term average.
“This is a warning of what will only be an average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mawald, who was not part of the forecast teams.
The prediction makes sense given how warm the world is already, and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius (roughly twenty degrees Fahrenheit) is expected from human-caused climate change in the next five years, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said. Tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth, who were not part of the forecasting teams. Add to that the possibility of a strong El Nino – the natural cyclical warming of parts of the Pacific that alters the world’s weather – that could throw another few tenths of a degree up temporarily and bring the world up to 1.5 degrees.
The world is in the second year in a row from La Nina, unlike El Nino, which has a slight global cooling effect but is not enough to counteract the global warming of greenhouse gases released from burning coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said. Five-year forecasts say La Nina is likely to end late this year or 2023.
The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on an upward escalator. Scientists said El Nino, La Nina, and a few other natural changes in the weather are like taking steps up or down that escalator.
Regionally, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter three times more than the globe on average. The report predicted that while US southwest and southwest Europe will likely be drier than normal in the next five years, conditions are expected to be wetter than normal in the often arid African Sahel, northern Europe, northeastern Brazil, and Australia. .
The global team has been making these predictions informally for a decade and formally for about five years, Hermansson said, with more than 90% accuracy.
NASA’s chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, said the numbers in this report are “a little bit warmer” than used by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He is also skeptical about the skill level of long-term regional forecasts.
“Regardless of what is projected here, it is very likely that we will exceed 1.5°C in the next decade or so, but that does not necessarily mean that we are committed to this in the long term – or that working to limit further change is to reduce further change,” Schmidt said in an email.
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