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    • The climate agency says this is likely to be the hottest year on record
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    The climate agency says this is likely to be the hottest year on record

    Online Niel Posted on

    By MELINA WALLING

    CHICAGO (AP) — For the second year in a row, Earth will almost certainly be the hottest it’s ever been. And for the first time, the globe this year reached more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming compared to the pre-industrial average, the European climate agency Copernicus said Thursday.

    “This relentless nature of warming I think is worrying,” said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus.

    Buontempo said the data clearly show that the planet would not see such a long sequence of record temperatures without the steady increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that lead to global warming.

    He quoted other factors which contribute to exceptionally warm years like last year and this year. These include El Nino – the temporary warming of parts of the Pacific that changes weather around the world – as well as volcanic eruptions that spew water vapor into the air and variations in energy from the sun. But he and other scientists say the long-term increase in temperatures beyond fluctuations like El Nino is a bad sign.

    “A very strong El Nino event is a glimpse of what will be the new normal a decade from now,” said Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the nonprofit Berkeley Earth.

    News of a likely second year of record heat comes a day after US Republican Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and promised to boost oil drilling and production, he was re-elected to the presidency. It also comes days before the next UN climate change conference, called COP29, begins in Azerbaijan. Talks are expected to focus on how to generate trillions of dollars to help the world transition to clean energy like wind and solar and avoid more warming.

    Also Thursday a report published by the United Nations Environment Programme called for increased funding to adapt to global warming and its consequences. It found that the $28 billion spent worldwide to adapt to climate change in 2022 – the latest year for which data is available – is a record high. But it still falls short of the estimated $187 billion to $359 billion needed each year to deal with heat, floods, droughts and storms exacerbated by climate change.

    “The world is on fire,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a pre-recorded statement marking the report’s release. “Mankind is setting the planet on fire and paying the price” with the most vulnerable most affected, he said.

    “Frankly, there is no excuse for the world not to take adaptation seriously,” said UNEP Director Inger Andersen. “We need well-funded and effective adaptation that includes fairness and equity.”

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    FILE – A woman, center, cries as heatstroke patients receive treatment at a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, June 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan, File)

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    Buontempo pointed out that going above the warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) for a single year is different from the goal adopted in the 2015 Paris Agreement. That goal was meant to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial times, on average, over 20 or 30 years.

    A United Nations report this year said that since the mid-1800s, on average, the world has already warmed by 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.3 degrees Fahrenheit) – up from earlier estimates of 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) or 1.2 degrees (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit). This is worrying because the UN says the world’s nations’ greenhouse gas emission reduction targets are still not ambitious enough to keep the 1.5 degrees Celsius target on track.

    The target was chosen to try to prevent the worst effects of climate change on humanity, including extreme weather. “The heat waves, storm damage and droughts we’re experiencing now are just the tip of the iceberg,” said Natalie Mahowald, director of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University.

    Exceeding that number in 2024 doesn’t mean the overall trend line of global warming has, but “absent concerted action, it will happen soon,” said Michael Mann, a climatologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

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