With the continuity of human-made climate change, there’s a 48% chance that the globe will reach a yearly average of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels of the late 1800s at least once between now and 2026.
A team of 11 different forecast centers predicted the 50-50 chance that Earth will temporarily hit that temperature mark within the next five years for the World Meteorological Organization late Monday.
Last year, the same forecasters put the odds at closer to 40% and a decade ago it was only 10%.
The team, coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office, in their five-year general outlook said there is a 93% chance that the world will set a record for hottest year by the end of 2026. They also said there’s a 93% chance that the five years from 2022 to 2026 will be the hottest on record.
Forecasters also predict the devastating fire-prone megadrought in the U.S. Southwest will keep going. The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change published in February.
“We’re going to see continued warming in line with what is expected with climate change,” said UK Met Office senior scientist Leon Hermanson, who coordinated the report.
Even if the world hits that mark of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial times — the globe has already warmed about 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s.
“This is a warning of what will be just average in a few years,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the forecast teams.
The prediction makes sense given how warm the world already is and an additional tenth of a degree Celsius. Add to that the likelihood of a strong El Nino, which could up another couple tenths of a degree on top temporarily and the world gets to 1.5 degrees.
The world is in the second straight year of a La Nina, the opposite of El Nino, which has a slight global cooling effect but isn’t enough to counter the overall warming of heat-trapping gases spewed by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, scientists said.
The greenhouse effect from fossil fuels is like putting global temperatures on a rising escalator. El Nino, La Nina and a handful of other natural weather variations are like taking steps up or down on that escalator, scientists said.
On a regional scale, the Arctic will still be warming during the winter at rate three times more than the globe on average. While the American Southwest and southwestern Europe are likely to be drier than normal the next five years, wetter than normal conditions are expected for Africa’s often arid Sahel region, northern Europe, northeast Brazil and Australia, the report predicted.
-AP