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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/19/red-alert-last-year-was-hottest-year-ever-by-wide-margin-says-un-report>
"The world has never been closer to breaching the 1.5C (2.7F) global heating
limit, even if only temporarily, the United Nations’ weather agency has warned.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed on Tuesday that 2023 was
the hottest year on record by a clear margin. In a report on the climate, it
found that records were “once again broken, and in some cases smashed” for key
indicators such as greenhouse gas pollution, surface temperatures, ocean heat
and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat.
Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organisation was
now “sounding the red alert to the world”.
The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45C higher
last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature
at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil and gas.
The error margin of 0.12C in the temperature estimate is large enough that the
earth may have already heated 1.5C. But this would not mean world leaders have
broken the promise they made in Paris in 2015 to halt global heating to that
level by the end of the century, scientists warn, because they measure global
heating using a 30-year average rather than counting a spike in a single year.
The report documented violent weather extremes – particularly heat – on every
inhabited continent. Some of the weather events were made stronger or more
likely by climate change, rapid attribution studies have shown.
Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who was not
involved in the report, said: “If we do not stop burning fossil fuels, the
climate will continue to warm, making life more dangerous, more unpredictable,
and more expensive for billions of people on earth.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
