Record Temperatures Will Threaten Global Food Supply, Scientists Warn

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned that the world will become warmer in the next five years, with aver­age near-sur­face tem­per­a­tures likely to exceed the 1.5 °C warm­ing thresh­old.

According to the WMO’s Global Annual to Decadal Update report, there is a 66 per­cent chance for the 1.5 °C limit to be crossed by 2027, while it is almost cer­tain (at a prob­a­bil­ity of 98 per­cent) that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period from 2023 to 2027, will be the hottest on record.

“Global mean tem­per­a­tures are pre­dicted to con­tinue increas­ing, mov­ing us away fur­ther and fur­ther away from the cli­mate we are used to,” said Leon Hermanson, a sci­en­tist at Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather ser­vice, who led the report.

Under the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the world’s nations pledged to keep the rise in global tem­per­a­tures below 2 °C – and prefer­ably below 1.5 °C – this cen­tury com­pared to pre-indus­trial lev­els to stave off a chain reac­tion of pos­si­bly irre­versible effects on the planet.

The mete­o­ro­log­i­cal orga­ni­za­tion attrib­uted the pro­jected surge in global tem­per­a­tures to the com­bi­na­to­r­ial effects of an expected El Niño phe­nom­e­non, a warm­ing of the ocean’s sur­face, and anthro­pogenic cli­mate change.

“A warm­ing El Niño is expected to develop in the com­ing months, and this will com­bine with human-induced cli­mate change to push global tem­per­a­tures into uncharted ter­ri­tory,” said Petteri Taalas, the organ­i­sa­tion’s direc­tor-gen­eral.

“This will have far-reach­ing reper­cus­sions for health, food secu­rity, water man­age­ment and the envi­ron­ment,” he added. ​“We need to be pre­pared.”

The planet has never expe­ri­enced a rise in aver­age tem­per­a­tures above the 1.5 °C thresh­old. The high­est recorded increase in global tem­per­a­tures in pre­vi­ous years was 1.28 °C above pre-indus­trial lev­els.

The WMO also noted that El Niño typ­i­cally increases tem­per­a­tures in the year after it devel­ops, mean­ing that the effects of the expected El Niño in global tem­per­a­tures are expected to be per­ceived no sooner than 2024.

The orga­ni­za­tion nev­er­the­less clar­i­fied that the expected surge in tem­per­a­tures above the 1.5°C limit would be tem­po­rary.

“This report does not mean that we will per­ma­nently exceed the 1.5 °C level spec­i­fied in the Paris Agreement, which refers to long-term warm­ing over many years,” Chris Hewitt, direc­tor of cli­mate ser­vices at the WMO, told Olive Oil Times.

“However, WMO is sound­ing the alarm that we will breach the 1.5°C level on a tem­po­rary basis with increas­ing fre­quency,” he added.

Hewitt also said that the Mediterranean region is expected to expe­ri­ence exten­sive con­se­quences of the increase in tem­per­a­ture.

“Petteri Taalas said at the [WMO report] press con­fer­ence that indeed Europe and the Mediterranean is one of the regions which will be impacted by ris­ing tem­per­a­tures and chang­ing pre­cip­i­ta­tion pat­terns,” he said. ​“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also has indi­cated this.”

Other regions, includ­ing Northern Europe, Alaska and the Sahel in Africa, will likely receive increased rain­fall in the next five years, while reduced pre­cip­i­ta­tion lev­els are fore­casted for the Amazon and parts of Australia, the WMO report said.

Meanwhile, the ​‘global stock­take,’ a com­po­nent of the Paris Agreement used to assess nations’ col­lec­tive progress toward meet­ing the agreement’s cli­mate goals, is expected to dom­i­nate the agenda in the United Nations COP28 cli­mate sum­mit sched­uled to take place in Dubai in November.

“The global stock­take will pro­vide crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion for coun­tries and stake­hold­ers to see what progress has been made on meet­ing the Paris Agreement goals, as well as iden­tify any remain­ing gaps and oppor­tu­ni­ties for increased action,” said Joanna Post, the pro­gram offi­cer with the U.N. Climate Change’s inter­gov­ern­men­tal sup­port and col­lec­tive progress divi­sion.

“To put it sim­ply – the global stock­take will help spur coun­tries to step up cli­mate action to avoid the worst impacts of cli­mate change,” she con­cluded.

• World Meteorological Organization
• The Guardian
• U.N. Climate Champions