`WMO: Next Five Years Will Be Hotter than The Last Five - Olive Oil Times
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WMO: Next Five Years Will Be Hotter than The Last Five

By Paolo DeAndreis
May. 18, 2022 13:44 UTC

A new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) showed that cur­tail­ing global sur­face tem­per­a­ture rise by 1.5 ºC above the pre-indus­trial aver­age may be more dif­fi­cult than pre­vi­ously thought.

The WMO has esti­mated a 48 per­cent chance aver­age global tem­per­a­tures will rise by 1.7 ºC in the next half-decade.

We are get­ting mea­sur­ably closer to tem­porar­ily reach­ing the lower tar­get of the Paris Agreement on cli­mate change… an indi­ca­tor of the point at which cli­mate impacts will become increas­ingly harm­ful for peo­ple and indeed the entire planet.- Petteri Taalas, sec­re­tary-gen­eral, WMO

According to the orga­ni­za­tion, there is also a 93 per­cent chance that one of the years between 2022 and 2026 will become the warmest year on record.

The United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, which con­tributed to the report, esti­mated only a 10 per­cent like­li­hood for the 1.5 °C thresh­old to be crossed between 2017 and 2021.

See Also:Record Heatwave and Drought in Pakistan Threaten Crops and Olive Farming

In its Global Annual to Decadal Climate report update, the WMO explained that there is also a 93 per­cent chance that the next five years will record higher aver­age tem­per­a­tures than the pre­vi­ous five years.

The orga­ni­za­tion also noted that aver­age annual tem­per­a­tures would accel­er­ate more sharply in the Arctic than in the rest of the world.

The WMO also pre­dicted that rain­fall pat­terns would con­tinue to change in cer­tain regions.

“Predicted pre­cip­i­ta­tion pat­terns for 2022 com­pared to the 1991 to 2020 aver­age sug­gest an increased chance of drier con­di­tions over south­west­ern Europe and south­west­ern North America, and wet­ter con­di­tions in north­ern Europe, the Sahel, north-east Brazil and Australia,” the report authors wrote.

However, the WMO warned that its fore­cast is not an offi­cial esti­mate for any region or nation but guid­ance for regional and national cli­mate and weather research cen­ters.

Still, those pre­dic­tions seemed to con­firm how regions such as Spain, Italy and Portugal, where most European olive oil pro­duc­tion takes place, might be forced to cope with wors­en­ing cli­mate con­di­tions.

Such esti­mates come on the heels of pre­vi­ous research that found cli­mate change will sig­nif­i­cantly impact the Mediterranean basin.

A study pub­lished by Nature showed how the weak­en­ing Gulf Stream might alter the sta­bil­ity of the con­di­tions that have helped make the region the cra­dle of olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Mediterranean farm­ers have grown their crops for cen­turies. Spain and Italy are con­sid­ered the first places des­tined to expe­ri­ence new and unpre­dictable cli­mate events that researchers believe might rapidly expand to the whole Mediterranean basin. Both coun­tries are cop­ing with long-last­ing droughts and deser­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The WMO report also fore­casted drier con­di­tions in the Amazon basin, while wet­ter pat­terns are expected for 2022 to 2026 in the Sahel, north­ern Europe, Alaska and north­ern Siberia.

“Predicted pre­cip­i­ta­tion pat­terns for the November to March 2022/23 to 2026/27 aver­age, com­pared to the 1991 to 2020 aver­age, sug­gest increased pre­cip­i­ta­tion in the trop­ics and reduced pre­cip­i­ta­tion in the sub­trop­ics, con­sis­tent with the pat­terns expected from cli­mate warm­ing,” the WMO report authors wrote.

“This study shows… that we are get­ting mea­sur­ably closer to tem­porar­ily reach­ing the lower tar­get of the Paris Agreement on cli­mate change,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas wrote. ​“The 1.5 °C fig­ure is not some ran­dom sta­tis­tic. It is rather an indi­ca­tor of the point at which cli­mate impacts will become increas­ingly harm­ful for peo­ple and indeed the entire planet.”

“For as long as we con­tinue to emit green­house gases, tem­per­a­tures will con­tinue to rise,” he added. ​“And along­side that, our oceans will con­tinue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glac­i­ers will con­tinue to melt, sea level will con­tinue to rise and our weather will become more extreme. Arctic warm­ing is dis­pro­por­tion­ately high and what hap­pens in the Arctic affects all of us.”

The Paris Agreement focused on pre­vent­ing the global sur­face tem­per­a­ture from ris­ing more than 1.5 ºC com­pared to the aver­age tem­per­a­ture from 1850 to 1990.

“A sin­gle year of exceedance above 1.5 ºC does not mean we have breached the iconic thresh­old of the Paris Agreement, but it does reveal that we are edg­ing ever closer to a sit­u­a­tion where 1.5 ºC could be exceeded for an extended period,” said Leon Hermanson, a researcher at the UK Met Office and co-author of the WMO report.

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