Election fatigue? Check out this new UN climate report and feel even worse.
Climate change may have been the sleeper issue of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, but it's been a top issue on the global scene. That's why a new climate report, released on election day of all days, is so important.
The report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is designed to inform negotiators at the latest round of UN climate talks in Marrakech, Morocco.
It depicts a world that is warming at an accelerating rate, with the window for action closing fast before so much warming becomes locked into the climate system that irreversible impacts, such as runaway melting of continental ice sheets, become all but assured.
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The WMO found that the five-year period from 2011 to 2015 was the warmest such period on record, dating back to the late 19th century.
Last year, which was the warmest year on record (until the end of 2016, that is), global average surface temperatures reached 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, above the preindustrial average for the first time, the WMO found.
Since the Paris Climate Agreement, negotiated late last year, seeks to limit global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius, including the more stringent goal of 1.5 degrees of warming through 2100, the report makes clear that we are already dangerously close to the global warming guardrail.
“The Paris Agreement aims at limiting the global temperature increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius and pursuing efforts towards 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a press release.
The WMO's "State of the Climate" report also shows that the links between global warming and extreme weather events, such as heat waves, heavy rain and snowstorms as well as droughts are becoming clearer.
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For example, as the study notes, out of 79 studies on extreme weather events that were published in an academic journal between 2011 and 2014, more than half found that human-caused climate change made the event more likely or extreme.
For example, some of the studies the WMO report cites found that a warming climate due to greenhouse gas emissions made extreme heat events at least 10 times more likely.
“The effects of climate change have been consistently visible on the global scale since the 1980s: rising global temperature, both over land and in the ocean; sea-level rise; and the widespread melting of ice. It has increased the risks of extreme events such as heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods,” Taalas said.
The report found that Arctic sea ice continues to decline, with the 2011 to 2015 average sea ice extent at 28 percent below the 1981-2010 average.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million in 2015, and is expected to surpass it during 2016. While this is partly a symbolic milestone, the amount of warming the planet will see is directly related to this figure.
This report lines up with other recent climate assessments, but the WMO says that the five-year timeframe it looked at better captures the trajectory of global warming since it factors out some short-term, natural sources of climate variability, such as El Niño.
According to the WMO, a strong La Niña event in 2011 and powerful El Niño during 2015 and 2016 influenced the temperatures of individual years "without changing the underlying warming trend."
Andrew Freedman is Mashable's Senior Editor for Science and Special Projects. Prior to working at Mashable, Freedman was a Senior Science writer for Climate Central. He has also worked as a reporter for Congressional Quarterly and Greenwire/E&E Daily. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. He has provided commentary on climate science and policy for Sky News, CBC Radio, NPR, Al Jazeera, Sirius XM Radio, PBS NewsHour, and other national and international outlets. He holds a Masters in Climate and Society from Columbia University, and a Masters in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.
