C3S indicates 2024 may be the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023. It highlights climate change’s role in this heat spike, with global temperatures potentially exceeding the 1.5 °C threshold. As COP29 approaches, experts stress the need for urgent climate action to meet Paris Agreement goals.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has reported that 2024 is poised to become the hottest year on record, surpassing 2023’s unprecedented global temperatures. C3S data, illustrating sharp temperature increases from January to October, indicates that only an unlikely cooling trend in the remaining months could alter this trajectory. Carlo Buontempo, Director of C3S, attributed this significant warming trend primarily to climate change, emphasizing its global impact across all continents and ocean bodies. For the first time since recording began, Earth is expected to breach the 1.5 °C warming threshold compared to pre-industrial levels from 1850 to 1990, marking a critical milestone in climate science. Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, expressed her concern regarding the insufficient global efforts to address carbon emissions, which threaten the Paris Agreement’s objective of limiting average warming to below 1.5 °C by 2030. The year 2024’s rising temperatures have already resulted in disastrous climate events, including severe flooding in Bangladesh and wildfires in Peru, further highlighting the urgent need for substantial climate action ahead of the COP29 summit in Azerbaijan.
The report from the Copernicus Climate Change Service indicates alarming trends in global warming, highlighting the pressing nature of climate change that the world currently faces. Temperature increases are contributing to increasingly severe weather events, emphasizing the dual impact of climate change on both temperature records and environmental catastrophes. COP29, a forthcoming climate summit, aims to address these issues through international collaboration and significant funding to mitigate the effects of climate change and adhere to global climate agreements.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service’s assertion that 2024 is likely to set a new temperature record serves as a critical wake-up call regarding the urgency of climate action. The consensus among experts is clear: without immediate and substantial efforts to reduce carbon emissions, the targets outlined in the Paris Agreement will be increasingly unattainable. Given the trends observed this year, it is critical that global leaders act decisively at COP29 to address these pressing challenges.
Original Source: www.wionews.com