There is currently a huge gap between climate targets and reality, underlines a recent climate report by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization.
We are heading in the wrong direction, warns the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in its latest climate report.
The Finnish expert believes that the main message of the report is that current measures are not sufficient to mitigate climate change and achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement aims to keep the global average temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to work towards limiting warming to less than 1.5°C.
According to the WMO report, greenhouse gas concentrations continue to rise.
In 2020 and 2021, there was a slight dip in carbon dioxide emissions due to the pandemic. At the beginning of 2022, however, carbon dioxide emissions were globally higher than before the corona pandemic, at the beginning of 2019.
New heat records in the coming years
Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, also points out from the WMO report what kind of picture it paints of the global temperature in the next few years.
The past seven years have been record warm.
– According to the report, there is about a 93 percent probability that one of the next few years 2022–2026 will be record warm, i.e. break the current record from 2016, says Mika Rantanen, a researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
In addition, the report gives an almost 50 percent probability that in the next five years the average annual temperature will be, at least in one year, temporarily 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times.
The amount of heat in the seas has also been record high in recent years.
The WMO report also draws attention to extreme weather phenomena.
Global warming will increasingly affect the lives of billions of people – most of all those who are already in a vulnerable position.
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