For anyone who's missed the drumbeat of alarming headlines, global warming can sound comforting, even benign – as in, better beach weather.
It's a difference of a few degrees.
“Who can tell the difference between a 77° and an 81° (Fahrenheit) day?” asked best-selling American author and commentator Jeff Goodell, whose new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, explores the extreme ways in which human-induced climate change already is dramatically altering our planet.
And yet, what a difference a few degrees – or just one-tenth – makes.
The World Meteorological Organization warned the average temperature in 2023 has risen by 1.4° Celsius from pre-industrial times, just below the 1.5° target in 2015 Paris Agreement.
Looking ahead, the U.N. weather agency said, El Niño is poised to continue through winter and spring in the Northern Hemisphere and likely peak as a strong climate event – and could push the average past the 1.5° threshold.
"Earth’s vital signs are failing: record emissions, ferocious fires, deadly droughts and the hottest year ever," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told leaders at the U.N. climate summit on Friday.
"We are miles from the goals of the Paris Agreement – and minutes to midnight for the 1.5° limit. "But it is not too late. We can - you can - prevent planetary crash and burn, we have the technologies to avoid the worst of climate chaos if we act now. " he said. "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has charted a clear path to a 1.5° world."
That path is clear, he added: "We cannot save a burning planet with a firehose of fossil fuels. We must accelerate a just, equitable transition to renewables."
A torrent of scientific climate reports have documented the effects, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels dug up or pumped from the ground. The Earth is hotter today than it's been in the last 125,000 years, and it’s only getting hotter. Today’s extreme heat, Goodell wrote, “is an entirely human artifact, a legacy of human civilization as real as the Great Wall of China."
Answers to these existential threats as the Earth barrels toward climate crisis and chaos at best, or climate disaster at worst, is what will be expected of the delegates attending the annual U.N. climate summit, schmooze fest, and trade show, known as COP28, which got underway this week in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
On its first day, delegates approved the creation of a new loss and damage fund to help vulnerable nations and victims cope with climate disasters. The deal capped years of negotiations and provided the talks with an early win.
Governments led by Germany and the UAE pledged more than US$400 million to set it up; Germany and the UAE each promised US$100 million, followed by the United Kingdom's US$50 million, the United States' US$17.5 million and Japan's US $10 million.
"Loss and damage has been a central priority of the U.N.'s climate efforts," Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, told an opening press conference. "The discussions were challenging."
The announcement "gives this U.N. climate conference a running start," he said. "Governments and their negotiators must use this momentum to deliver truly ambitious outcomes here in Dubai. We must keep our eyes on the prize and every minute counts."
Mohamed Adow, founder and director of Power Shift Africa, a think tank to mobilize climate action, welcomed the fund's creation but said the most pressing issue was to get money flowing into it and to people that need it.
"The initial funding pledges are clearly inadequate and will be a drop in the ocean compared the scale of the need they are to address," he said. "In particular, the level announced by the U.S. is embarrassing for President Biden and John Kerry. It just shows how this must be just the start."
COP28 is seen as a critical moment for climate action, with 70,000 people from 196 nations and the European Union, including delegates, industry leaders, activists, journalists, Indigenous peoples and others. The U.N. says the summit will be a “turning point” with countries not only agreeing what climate actions need to be taken, but also how they will be implemented.
Still, a persistent pall of skepticism and distrust has hung over COP28 since it was announced that it would be held in a petrostate, United Arab Emirates, and presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., or ADNOC, the UAE’s state petroleum company.
Scientists have observed changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, and many are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Some already set in motion, like sea level rise, are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.
But if nations and businesses quickly cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to limit climate change, it said, air quality would quickly improve and several decades global temperatures would stabilize.
"Deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would lead to a discernible slowdown in global warming within around two decades, and also to discernible changes in atmospheric composition within a few years," Geneva-based IPCC said in its latest synthesis report.
'The obligation of impartiality'
The impact of these most basic climate facts is what Guterres observed firsthand when he visited Antarctica, where ice is melting into the sea at a record rate. Guterres said he went away “alarmed” by what he saw in the Southern Ocean.
“Fossil fuel pollution is heating our planet, unleashing climate anarchy in Antarctica. That directly endangers the lives and livelihoods of people in coastal communities across the globe," he said. "Homes are no longer insurable and it threatens the very existence of some small island states.”
On the eve of COP28, an internal document leaked to an environmental group revealed how the UAE, with Al Jaber as COP president, has maneuvered to exploit the summit and the run-up to it to promote lucrative oil, gas and petrochemical deals around the globe.
The document, which has more than 100 pages of plans and talking points aimed at using COP28 to bolster the UAE’s business interests and petroleum production, was obtained and posted online by the Center for Climate Reporting and the BBC.
It revealed, for example, how the UAE schemed to approach a Colombian minister with an offer to support development of that country’s fossil fuel resources and how the UAE’s state oil company suggested it could partner with China on developing liquefied natural gas opportunities in Mozambique, Canada and Australia.
Al Jaber, at a news conference in Dubai, decried the reports, saying they were “not true, incorrect, and not accurate.” He called them “an attempt to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency.”
However, Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the UNFCCC who oversaw the 2015 Paris Agreement, said the COP28 presidency was “caught red handed” and has no option but to “unequivocally step up the transparency and accountability.”
The U.N.'s annual climate summits remain the world’s foremost negotiating platform for dealing with causes and threats of climate change, and any attempt to use the process to cut business deals would appear to be a serious breach of what the world body expects of a COP president.
As the treaty platform for holding the talks, the UNFCCC said the “cardinal principle” for COP presidents is “the obligation of impartiality.”
With the allegations against the presiding COP president threatening to undermine confidence in the climate summit before it even got underway, however, the immediacy of the ever-growing danger of climate change was made clear in a pair of recent U.N. studies.
WMO has reported that the level of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record high last year, with no sign of the trend abating. For the first time, globally averaged concentrations of CO2, the most important greenhouse gas, were a full 50% above the pre-industrial era, and they continued to grow in 2023.
In a related record reported by WMO, October smashed the monthly global temperature record and extended a streak of extraordinary land and ocean surface temperatures and low sea ice.
It was the fifth month in a row of record-warm global temperatures, almost guaranteeing 2023 will go into the books as the warmest year on record. What that means: Earth is in uncharted territory and can look forward to a further spike in temperatures, both on land and in the ocean.
“This is worrying news for the planet,” says Christopher Hewitt, WMO's director of climate services.
This story has been updated with additional details.
