
“We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the truth is… we have control of the wheel.” On Wednesday, June 5, World Environment Day, in a major speech punctuated by his customary catchphrases, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hammered home the gravity of the climate crisis and the urgent need for more ambitious action.
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet (…). We are not only in danger. We are the danger”, he told an audience of politicians, business leaders and representatives of civil society gathered at the Natural History Museum in New York, calling it “a moment of truth.”
Whatever figures or curves you look at, the indicators are all in the red. May 2024 was the hottest May on record worldwide since records began, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) announced on Wednesday. May has thus continued a series of 12 consecutive months that have broken their own heat records since June 2023. Over the last 12 months, global temperatures have reached an unprecedented level at 0.75°C above normal (1991-2020) and 1.63°C above the pre-industrial era. This sequence is the second longest on record, after 16 consecutive record months in 2015-2016.
A “shocking” but “not surprising” result, according to Carlo Buontempo, Director of C3S. “While this sequence of record-breaking months will eventually be interrupted, the overall signature of climate change remains and there is no sign in sight of a change in such a trend. We are living in unprecedented times,” he said. On Wednesday, an international study also showed that the rate of warming is faster than ever.
Climate change is caused by the steady rise in greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) and deforestation. This long-term trend has been compounded in recent months by the natural phenomenon of El Niño which has boosted global temperatures. It is now coming to an end, having started in June 2023 and peaked in December. This explosive cocktail has triggered numerous extreme events around the world, from deadly heatwaves in India, Pakistan and Mexico to floods in Brazil, droughts in southern Africa and a massive bleaching of the world’s corals.
The end of extreme temperatures is not yet in sight. “This year is shaping up to either match or surpass 2023 as the hottest year on record,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climatologist at the Berkeley Earth Institute. “It will likely be the first year to exceed 1.5°C warming,” he said, referring to the most ambitious target of the 2015 Paris Agreement. This overheating could be somewhat limited in 2025 with the likely arrival, in the second half of 2024, of a La Niña episode that should lower the global thermometer.
You have 58.13% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.