The last eight years, if projections for 2022 hold, will be recorded as warmer than any year before 2015, the United Nations (UN) recently announced, detailing a dramatic increase in the pace of global warming.
Sea level rise, melting glaciers, torrential rains, heat waves and the deadly disasters they cause have accelerated, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a report at the opening of the COP27 UN Climate Summit in Sharm el -Sheikh, in Egypt, according Science Alert.
“As COP27 begins, our planet is sending a wake-up call,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said, describing the report as “a chronicle of climate chaos.”
Limiting global warming, a goal viewed with skepticism by scientists
The Earth has warmed by more than 1.1 degrees Celsius since the end of the 19th century, and about half of that increase has occurred in the past 30 years, the report said.
Nearly 200 nations meeting in Egypt have set out to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal that some scientists consider unattainable.
“If ever there was a year to throw away, chop up and burn the ‘horse glasses’ of global climate inaction, 2022 should be it,” said Dave Reay, head of the University of California’s Climate Change Institute. Edinburgh.
2022 is on track to be the fifth or sixth warmest year on record, despite the 2020 impact of La Nina – a periodic, natural phenomenon in the Pacific that cools the atmosphere.
The rate of sea level rise has doubled in the last 30 years, amid melting ice caps
Surface water in the ocean – which absorbs more than 90% of the heat built up from human carbon emissions – reached record temperatures in 2021, warming particularly rapidly over the past 20 years.
Marine heat waves have also been on the rise, with devastating consequences for coral reefs and the half a billion people who depend on them for food and livelihoods.
Overall, 55 percent of the ocean surface experienced at least one marine heat wave in 2022, the report said.
Driven by melting ice sheets and glaciers, the rate of sea-level rise has doubled over the past 30 years, threatening tens of millions of people in low-lying coastal areas.
In the European Alps, glacier melting records were shattered in 2022, with average thickness losses ranging from 3 to over 4 meters the highest ever recorded.