UN weather agency cranks up the climate alarm as global temperatures rise by a small fraction of a degree

Photosynthesis [image credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]

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Everything about climate, other than some mythical past optimum, is branded as an actual or potential disaster by carbon dioxide demonisers like the WMO. Try not to yawn.
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GENEVA (AP, via PBS Online.) — The U.N. weather agency is sounding a “red alert” about global warming, citing record-smashing increases last year in greenhouse gases, land and water temperatures and melting of glaciers and sea ice, and is warning that the world’s efforts to reverse the trend have been inadequate.

The World Meteorological Organization said there is a “high probability” that 2024 will be another record-hot year.

The Geneva-based agency, in a “State of the Global Climate” report released Tuesday, ratcheted up concerns that a much-vaunted climate goal is increasingly in jeopardy: That the world can unite to limit planetary warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels. [Talkshop comment – meaning Little Ice Age levels].

“Never have we been so close – albeit on a temporary basis at the moment – to the 1.5° C lower limit of the Paris agreement on climate change,” said Celeste Saulo, the agency’s secretary-general. “The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world.”

The 12-month period from March 2023 to February 2024 pushed beyond that 1.5-degree limit, averaging 1.56 C (2.81 F) higher, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Service.

It said the calendar year 2023 was just below 1.5 C at 1.48 C (2.66 F), but a record hot start to this year pushed beyond that level for the 12-month average.

“Earth’s issuing a distress call,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. “The latest State of the Global Climate report shows a planet on the brink. Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts.”

Omar Baddour, WMO’s chief of climate monitoring, said the year after an El Niño event — the cyclical warming of the Pacific Ocean that affects global weather patterns — normally tends to be warmer.

“So we cannot say definitively about 2024 is going to be the warmest year. But what I would say: There is a high probability that 2024 will again break the record of 2023, but let’s wait and see,” he said. “January was the warmest January on record. So the records are still being broken.”

Full article here.
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Image: Photosynthesis [credit: Nefronus @ Wikipedia]