UN Chief Says World Is On ‘Highway to Climate Hell’ As Planet Endures 12 Straight Months of Unprecedented Heathttps://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-may-2024-12th-consecutive-month-record-high-temperatureshttps://www.cnn.com/2024/06/05/climate/12-months-record-heat-un-speech/index.htmlhttps://news.un.org/en/story/2024/06/1150661
The planet just marked a “shocking” new milestone, enduring 12 consecutive months of unprecedented heat, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record, Copernicus data showed.
The 12-month heat streak was “shocking but not surprising” given human-caused climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, the director of Copernicus, who warned of worse to come. Unless planet-warming fossil fuel pollution is slashed, “this string of hottest months will be remembered as comparatively cold,” he said.
Copernicus released its data the same day as United Nations Secretary General António Guterres made an impassioned speech in New York about climate change, slamming fossil fuel companies as the “godfathers of climate chaos” and, for the first time, explicitly calling on all countries to ban advertising their fossil fuel products.
Guterres urged world leaders to swiftly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face dangerous tipping points. Pulling back from the brink “is still just about possible”, he continued, but only if we fight harder. It all depends on decisions taken by political leaders during this decade and “especially in the next 18 months.”
"The truth is, global emissions need to fall 9% every year until 2030 to keep the 1.5 degree limit alive, but they are heading in the wrong direction,"...“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” ... “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”
- UN Secretary General António Guterres
As temperatures surge, global climate commitments are “hanging by a thread,” he warned.
He said many in the oil and gas industry have “shamelessly greenwashed” while actively trying to delay climate action, aided and abetted by advertising and public relations companies.
Copernicus’ data showed each month since July 2023 has been at least 1.5 degrees warmer than temperatures before industrialization, when humans started burning large amounts of planet-heating fossil fuels.
The average global temperature over the past 12 months was 1.63 degrees above these pre-industrial levels.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/copernicus-may-2024-12th-consecutive-month-record-high-temperaturesUnder the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries agreed to limit global heating to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. While this aim refers to warming over decades, rather than a single month or year, scientists say this breach is an alarming signal.
“This is a harbinger of progressively more dangerous climate impacts close on the horizon,” said Richard Allan, a climate professor at the University of Reading in the UK.
The news comes as the western US is experiencing its first heat wave so far this summer with temperatures soaring into the triple digits. But unprecedented heat has already left a trail of death and destruction across the planet this spring.
Dozens have died in India over the past few weeks as temperatures pushed toward 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit); brutal temperatures in Southeast Asia have caused deaths, school closures and shriveled crops; and as heat surged in Mexico, howler monkeys dropped dead from trees.
Hotter air and oceans also fuel heavier rainfall and destructive storms like those that have battered the United States, Brazil, Kenya and the United Arab Emirates, among other nations, this year.
https://www.copernicus.eu/en/news/news/observer-esotc-2023-europe-experienced-extraordinary-year-extremes-record-breakingThe recent heat offers “a window into the future with extreme heat that challenges the limits of human survivability,” said Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. “It is vital people understand that every tenth of a degree of warming exposes more people to dangerous and potentially deadly heat,” he said.
... Guterres’ speech also referenced new data released by the World Meteorological Organization, which found a nearly 86% chance that at least one of the years between 2024 and 2028 will break the hottest-year record, set in 2023.https://wmo.int/news/media-centre/global-temperature-likely-exceed-15degc-above-pre-industrial-level-temporarily-next-5-yearsThe WMO also calculated a nearly 50% chance that global average temperatures over the entire five-year period between 2024 and 2028 would be more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. That would bring the world closer to breaching the longer-term 1.5-degree limit at the heart of the Paris Agreement.
Guterres laid blame for the climate crisis firmly at the doorstep of fossil fuel companies that “rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said.
These companies have spent billions of dollars over decades “distorting the truth, deceiving the public and sowing doubt,” he added. He called on every country to ban fossil fuel ads, similar to advertising bans implemented around the world for other products that harm human health, such as tobacco.
“We are at a moment of truth,” he said, adding that the battle for a liveable planet would be won or lost in this decade.
