This year is “virtually certain” to eclipse last year as the world’s warmest since records began, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said yesterday.
The data was released ahead of next week’s UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, where countries would try to agree to a huge increase in funding to tackle climate change.
However, former US president Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election has dampened expectations for what the talks can achieve.
Photo: AFP
C3S said that from January to last month, the average global temperature had been so high that this year is sure to be the world’s hottest year — unless the temperature anomaly in the rest of the year plunged to near-zero.
“The fundamental, underpinning cause of this year’s record is climate change,” C3S director Carlo Buontempo said.
“The climate is warming, generally. It’s warming in all continents, in all ocean basins,” he said.
“So we are bound to see those records being broken,” he added.
The scientists said that this year would also be the first year in which the planet is more than 1.5C° hotter than in the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale.
Carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal, oil and gas are the main cause of global warming.
ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne said she was not surprised by the milestone, and urged governments at COP29 to agree to stronger action to wean their economies off carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels.
“The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world,” she said.
Countries agreed in the 2015 Paris Agreement to try to prevent global warming surpassing 1.5C°, to avoid its worst consequences.
The world has not breached that target — which refers to an average global temperature of 1.5C° over decades — but C3S now expects the world to exceed the Paris goal around 2030.
“It’s basically around the corner now,” Buontempo said.
Every fraction of temperature increase fuels extreme weather.
Last month, catastrophic flash floods killed hundreds of people in Spain, record wildfires tore through Peru and flooding in Bangladesh destroyed more than 1 million tonnes of rice, sending food prices skyrocketing.
In the US, Hurricane Milton was also worsened by human-caused climate change.
C3S’ records go back to 1940, which are cross-checked with global temperature records going back to 1850.
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr has fired his national police chief, who gained attention for leading the separate arrests of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte on orders of the International Criminal Court and televangelist Apollo Carreon Quiboloy, who is on the FBI’s most-wanted list for alleged child sex trafficking. Philippine Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin did not cite a reason for the removal of General Nicolas Torre as head of the 232,000-member national police force, a position he was appointed to by Marcos in May and which he would have held until 2027. He was replaced by another senior police general, Jose
STILL AFLOAT: Satellite images show that a Chinese ship damaged in a collision earlier this month was under repair on Hainan, but Beijing has not commented on the incident Australia, Canada and the Philippines on Wednesday deployed three warships and aircraft for drills against simulated aerial threats off a disputed South China Sea shoal where Chinese forces have used risky maneuvers to try to drive away Manila’s aircraft and ships. The Philippine military said the naval drills east of Scarborough Shoal (Huangyan Island, 黃岩島) were concluded safely, and it did not mention any encounter with China’s coast guard, navy or suspected militia ships, which have been closely guarding the uninhabited fishing atoll off northwestern Philippines for years. Chinese officials did not immediately issue any comment on the naval drills, but they
POWER CONFLICT: The US president threatened to deploy National Guards in Baltimore. US media reports said he is also planning to station troops in Chicago US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened to deploy National Guard troops to yet another Democratic stronghold, the Maryland city of Baltimore, as he seeks to expand his crackdown on crime and immigration. The Republican’s latest online rant about an “out of control, crime-ridden” city comes as Democratic state leaders — including Maryland Governor Wes Moore — line up to berate Trump on a high-profile political stage. Trump this month deployed the National Guard to the streets of Washington, in a widely criticized show of force the president said amounts to a federal takeover of US capital policing. The Guard began carrying
Ukrainian drone attacks overnight on several Russian power and energy facilities forced capacity reduction at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant and set a fuel export terminal in Ust-Luga on fire, Russian officials said yesterday. A drone attack on the Kursk nuclear plant, not far from the border with Ukraine, damaged an auxiliary transformer and led to 50 percent reduction in the operating capacity at unit three of the plant, the plant’s press service said. There were no injuries and a fire sparked by the attack was promptly extinguished, the plant said. Radiation levels at the site and in the surrounding