According to the EU climate change agency Copernicus, today’s year will almost certainly be the first year since records began in which temperatures were on average more than 1.5 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average.
This also makes it the warmest year since measurements began. However, the Paris target of 1.5 degrees to curb the climate crisis is not yet considered missed as it is based on longer-term average values, it is said.
Copernicus predicts that global average temperatures this year could be at least 1.55 degrees above the global pre-industrial average. In 2023 it was 1.48 degrees. At the time, UN Secretary General António Guterres spoke of a “climate crisis”.
“This represents a new milestone in the global temperature record and should serve as an accelerator to increase targets for the upcoming COP29 climate conference,” Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the EU Climate Change Service, said of the latest data.
Climate scientist: “No breakthrough in COPs”
German climate scientist Mojib Latif is skeptical about the impact of the meeting: “The COPs are clearly not productive, and there will be no breakthrough in Baku,” he said. “Even if they try to sell the final declaration as such, as has so often been the case in recent years.”
At the 2015 World Climate Conference in Paris, countries around the world agreed to limit global warming to less than two degrees, but to 1.5 degrees if possible. “The 1.5 degree target has a high symbolic value,” explains climate scientist Steve Smith of the University of Oxford.
However, according to experts, there is currently no clear definition for these politically determined thresholds. Politicians generally only consider the 1.5 degree threshold to have been exceeded if the average annual temperature has been consistently above this value for twenty years, Latif said.
Greenhouse gas emissions are historically high
However, such a consideration is nonsensical: greenhouse gas emissions were again historically high last year and all climate parameters pointed in the wrong direction. It is absolutely clear that global warming will continue to increase; we don’t have to wait twenty years for confirmation.
Anders Levermann from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) also emphasized that the key question is no longer when the 1.5 degree threshold will be reached. “When will we reach net zero emissions, that has to be the goal, that’s why there has to be competition.”
Without stopping emissions, temperatures will continue to rise, according to the dpa climate researcher. One consequence is more and heavier heavy rainfall, such as that which has just hit the region around Valencia in Spain. “People will continue to die the more we raise temperatures,” said the PIK expert
Source: Krone
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