Europe Scientists Predict Another World Heat Record
2024-11-13
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1Europe's climate agency says this year is likely to break 2023's record for the hottest year ever.
2Researchers at the Copernicus agency also predicted 2024 will be the first year to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than what is called the pre-industrial period.
3That period, from 1850 to 1900, is when humans began the widespread burning of fossil fuels.
4The new data was released ahead of the United Nations COP29 climate meeting taking place this week in Azerbaijan.
5At that meeting, international representatives are expected to agree to call for more spending to fight the worldwide effects of climate change.
6The European climate agency said that from January to October, the average world temperature rose so much that 2024 would almost surely be the world's hottest year on record.
7Copernicus said its records date back to 1940 and are compared with world temperature records going back to 1850.
8The director of Copernicus, Carlo Buontempo, told Reuters news agency the main cause of this year's record is climate change.
9"The climate is warming, generally. It's warming in all continents, in all ocean basins. So we are bound to see those records being broken," Buontempo said.
10Buontempo also said the data clearly show such warming would not be happening without the continued release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
11Scientists say carbon dioxide is released by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
12Buontempo noted the importance of worldwide observations and data collection to support the group's findings and predictions.
13Copernicus gathers data from billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world.
14Sonia Seneviratne is a climate scientist at public research university ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
15She told Reuters she was not surprised by the new prediction.
16Seneviratne urged delegates at COP29 to agree to stronger action to limit the use of carbon-producing fossil fuels.
17"The limits that were set in the Paris agreement are starting to crumble given the too-slow pace of climate action across the world," she said.
18Many countries agreed to try to prevent the average temperature of the atmosphere from increasing by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius over a period of years by signing the 2015 Paris Agreement.
19Officials from Copernicus have said that the 1.5-degree Celsius limit could be passed around 2030.
20"It's basically around the corner now," Buontempo said.
21Climate scientists say each increase in temperature can fuel extreme weather.
22Recent examples of weather-related events include flooding that killed hundreds of people in Spain and wildfires in Peru.
23In Bangladesh, flooding destroyed more than 1 million tons of rice, driving food prices higher.
24I'm Bryan Lynn.