Fresh evidence today has set out how quickly the Earth’s climate is changing – in some places so fast it has shocked scientists.
The new report arrives as the UK’s long-standing political consensus on tackling climate change fractures – with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch questioning the necessary pace of climate action – and as President Donald Trump seeks to scrap US climate rules.
The new analysis from the United Nations’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) today found that 2024 was the hottest on records going back 175 years.
Each of the last 10 years has been in the top 10 warmest years on record – a trend that is unprecedented, as previously such a time period has always been punctuated by colder years.
“That has never happened before, going back to 1850,” said Prof Chris Hewitt, director of climate services at the WMO.
The team were also shocked by the way the final months of 2024 remained hot, even as the natural warming effect of the transient El Nino weather phenomenon subsided.
The fact the “warmth continued for so long” even the world moved to more neutral conditions after El Nino has been “really quite extraordinary” said Dr John Kennedy, lead author of the WMO’s State of the Global Climate Report for 2024.
It also found:
- Concentrations of carbon dioxide – the key driver of global warming – are at the highest levels in the last 800,000 years.
- Each of the past eight years has smashed new records for heat in the oceans
- The 18 lowest levels of sea ice in the Arctic in summer have all been in the past 18 years
- Glaciers have lost more ice in the last three years than in any other three-year period on record
- The rate of sea level rise has doubled since satellite measurements began.
The UK Met Office’s Prof Stephen Belcher said the earth is “profoundly ill. Many of the vital signs are sounding alarms”.
The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the planet is “issuing more distress signals” and urged…
