By Annie Guest: While the latest climate data is sobering, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, wants people to know it’s not too late to avert the worst of climate change. The EU’s climate service has confirmed that each of the past 12 months set a new global temperature record for the time of year. And the World Meteorological Organisation expects the hottest year on record before the end of the decade. Declan Gooch reports.
Declan Gooch: While Australia begins what the Weather Bureau says will be a warmer than average winter, parts of the world are baking. The Western United States is enduring the effects of a so-called heat dome and these park goers in the Californian city of Modesto say it’s becoming the norm.
Opinion: It gets hotter, worse every year. You just never know how the climate’s going to change. It’s hard to notice incremental changes, but yeah, it’s getting more and more extreme.
Declan Gooch: Limiting global warming to no more than one and a half degrees above pre-industrial levels has long been the focus of climate scientists. New figures from the World Meteorological Organisation suggest that threshold is getting dangerously close. Here’s WMO Deputy Secretary-General, Ko Barrett.
Ko Barrett: There is a nearly 9 in 10 likelihood that at least one year between 2024 and 2028 will be the hottest on record. There’s an 80% likelihood that the annual average global temperature will temporarily exceed 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels for at least one of the next five calendar years.
Declan Gooch: United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says the data is sobering, but there’s still time to avert the worst of climate change.
Antonio Guterres: We are playing Russian roulette with our planet and we need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the truth is we have control of the wheel. The 1.5 degree limit is still just about possible.
Declan Gooch: If that 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded on average over several years, scientists say the climate will reach a tipping point that would result in the failure of multiple ecosystems, more natural disasters and begin to render parts of the world uninhabitable. Australian National University climatologist Janette Lindesay says it’s getting dangerously close.
Janette Lindesey: Reaching 1.5 degrees once is not a new average of 1.5 degrees, but it is a milestone along the road to a new average of 1.5 degrees, which we are approaching much more rapidly than had actually been thought when we were looking at all of these things 15 years ago.
Declan Gooch: Independent climate consultant Darren Ray says what it means for Australia is that periods of wet La Nina conditions will grow more damaging and intense.
Darren Ray: When we get wet climate influences like La Nina years, which we’re expecting later this year, those events will have a lot more moisture in them and a lot more energy. And so this really raises the bar in terms of risk of flooding and extreme rainfall events and extreme conditions out of those events.
Declan Gooch: At the same time as the WMO released its report, the Copernicus Climate Service in Europe announced this May was the warmest May on record and the 12th month in a row where temperature records were broken. Here’s Janette Lindesay again.
Janette Lindesey: We haven’t seen this before. To have 12 in a row like this is unprecedented and it is telling us that global heating is well and truly with us and that it is reaching new extremes, if you like.
Declan Gooch: Darren Ray says there’s still room to reduce emissions in time, but in practice it would take an enormous amount of political will.
Darren Ray: There’s a little bit of a remaining emissions budget, carbon emissions budget, carbon dioxide and methane, etc. that we could emit and still pull up. But that amount is pretty tiny and our year on year emissions still remain very high.
Declan Gooch: He says governments must be setting more ambitious targets than net zero emissions by 2050.
Darren Ray: There’s a number of major elections coming up around the world. And so people’s choices around leaders who have strong emissions reductions policies and vision is an excellent thing to be doing.
Annie Guest: Climatologist Darren Ray ending that report by Declan Gooch.
