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

Online Niel November 8, 2024

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.

Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson put it in starker terms. “I think we missed the 1.5 degree window,” said Jackson, who heads the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that track countries’ carbon dioxide emissions. “It’s too much heating.”

Indiana State Climatologist Beth Hall said she was not surprised by Copernicus’ latest report, but stressed that people should remember that climate is a global issue beyond their local experiences with changing weather. “We tend to be isolated in our own individual world,” she said. Reports like this “take into account a lot of locations that aren’t in our backyard.”

Buontempo emphasized the importance of global observations, supported by international cooperation, which allow scientists to have confidence in the discovery of the new report: Copernicus derives its results from billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.

He said exceeding the benchmark of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) this year was “psychologically important” as nations make domestic decisions and approach negotiations at the annual UN climate change summit from November 11-22 in Azerbaijan.

“The decision, clearly, is ours. It belongs to each of us. And it is the decision of our society and our decision-makers as a consequence of that,” he said. “But I think these decisions are better made if they are based on evidence and facts.”

Associated Press reporters Seth Borenstein in Washington and Sibi Arasu in Bengaluru, India contributed to this report.

Follow Melina Walling on X, ex Twitter: @MelinaWalling.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from several private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs sTANDARDS for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and coverage areas funded at AP.org.

Originally published: Nov 7, 2024 at 10:31 am CST