'Continuous advance' of climate crisis pushes 1.15° C. warming

GENEVA (AN) — Europe's glaciers lost more than 5 cubic kilometers of ice – including 6% of all of Switzerland's glacier ice volume – just in the past year. Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record.

The past eight years were the warmest on record, despite three years of La Niña's cooling, the World Meteorological Organization said in its annual global climate report on Friday that highlights what it calls the "continuous advance of climate change."

Droughts, floods and heatwaves drove food insecurity and mass migration as communities on every continent were hit by astronomical costs, the U.N. weather agency said.

It found that in 2022 the global mean temperature, which combines near-surface temperature measurements over land and ocean, was 1.15° Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial average.

Business as usual is a 'death sentence'

People worldwide "continue to be gravely impacted by extreme weather and climate events" as carbon pollution keeps changing our world, WMO's Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said.

He pointed to continuous drought in East Africa, record-breaking rainfall in Pakistan and heatwaves in China and Europe.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was more blunt.

"Today’s policies would make our world 2.8° hotter by the end of the century," he said. "And this is a death sentence."

The ambition gap

Separately from the U.N. weather agency, a new international study found the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets that contain nearly all of the world's freshwater ice each year are shedding more than three times as much ice as three decades ago.

Guterres said governments must pick up the pace on carbon emissions cuts to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°.

"We also need massively scaled-up investments in adaptation and resilience, particularly for the most vulnerable countries and communities who have done the least to cause the crisis,” he said.

The 2015 Paris Agreement obliges nations to limit global warming to 2° above pre-industrial levels, or 1.5° if possible, by submitting carbon-cutting plans.

As of November 2022, a "substantial gap" remained between what governments are doing and what they need to do to comply with the treaty, according to Climate Action Tracker.

About 100 nations also lack adequate weather services to warn of and help prepare for disasters, said Taalas, a Finnish meteorologist.

But a U.N. early warning initiative aims to fill that gap, he said, through "improvement of observation networks, investments in early warning, hydrological and climate service capacities."

Taalas told a news conference that the Earth has stored more than 90% of the excess heat from human-caused fossil fuel burning in the ocean.

"Whave again broken new records in ocean heat content," he said, "which is, for example, giving more energy for tropical storms, cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons."