Most global Met agencies do not forecast that 2025 will be as hot as 2024.
Jan 14, 2025 07:12 IST First published on: Jan 14, 2025 at 07:12 IST
For most of last year, global temperature data sets had indicated that it was going to be the hottest on record. Last week, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that the average temperature in 2024 was 1.6 degrees Celsius more than that of the pre-Industrial Revolution era — .1 per cent more than the record set in 2023. The blistering heat does not yet mean that the world has defaulted on the Paris Pact’s threshold — the grim milestone is measured in decadal averages, and not on the basis of yearly temperature increases. But the forest fires raging in the US are the latest in a series of destructive events over 12 months that frame the seriousness of the climate crisis. According to a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) stock-taking in October last year, if countries do not change course drastically, the world will see warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The UNEP study estimates that global emissions need to drop to about 42 per cent of the 2019 levels in the next 10 years to keep temperature rise below the Paris Pact threshold. Data on global warming mitigation targets put the seriousness of this challenge in perspective. If all countries were to meet their current Paris Pact pledges by 2030, emissions would drop by only 10 per cent. The UN report was released about a month before the UNFCCC’s CoP 29 in Baku in Azerbaijan. Yet, the annual climate meet saw very little by way of creative interventions on ways to reduce emissions. Countries are expected to announce new climate mitigation plans, Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs, by the end of February. However, the recent history of climate negotiations offers very little hope that these pledges would be ambitious enough to maintain the sanctity of the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. At Baku, progress on the issue was stalled after a negotiation bloc of developing countries objected to any agreement that would give the UNFCCC oversight over how the NDCs are framed or implemented.
Most global Met agencies do not forecast that 2025 will be as hot as 2024. But policymakers would be wrong to read that as a respite. Several national weather bodies, including India’s, reckon their countries will continue to experience high temperatures. More importantly, globally, the temperature rise is likely to be only marginally lower than in the past two years. The UK’s Met Office, in fact, believes that 2025 could be the third hottest year on record. Environmental agencies all over the world have their work cut out.
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