The United Nations (UN) has declared that 2023 will go down in history as the hottest year ever and called for immediate action to stop global warming.
The World Meteorological Organisation of the UN issued a warning, stating that extreme weather had left “a trail of devastation and despair” and that 2023 had broken a number of climate records.
“It’s an overwhelming din of mismatched sounds,” stated WMO Director Petteri Taalas.
“Greenhouse gas emissions are at all-time highs. The temperature is at a record high worldwide. The rise in sea level is record-high. Sea ice in Antarctica is at a record low.”
As world leaders convened in Dubai for the UN COP28 climate conference, the WMO released its preliminary 2023 State of the Global Climate report.
The UN declared on Thursday that 2023 would go down in history as the hottest year ever and called for immediate action to stop global warming.
Scientists are cautioning that humanity may not have enough time to keep global warming to a manageable degree, so the stakes are higher than ever.
The 2015 Paris Climate Accords sought to keep global warming to 1.5°C, if feasible, and to far less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
However, the WMO noted in its report that as of the end of October 2023, data indicated that the current year was already about 1.4C warmer than the pre-industrial baseline.
The WMO said the difference between the first 10 months of this year and 2016 and 2020, which previously topped the charts as the warmest years on record, “is such that the final two months are very unlikely to affect the ranking.”
The analysis also revealed that since modern records began, the last nine years have been the hottest on record.
Taalas cautioned, “These are more than just statistics; we risk losing the race to save our glaciers and to rein in sea level rise.
“Although we cannot go back to the 20th century’s climate, we must take action today to reduce the risks of an increasingly unfriendly climate in the centuries to come.”
The World Meteorological Organisation warned that the warming El Nino weather phenomenon, which emerged in the middle of the year, was “likely to further fuel the heat in 2024.
“This is due to the fact that the naturally occurring climate pattern, which is generally linked to increased heat globally, raises global temperatures the year after it emerges,” it continued.
