The World Meteorological Organization has also warned that global temperature will soon exceed the most ambitious target of the Paris Climate Agreement.
“There is a 98% chance that at least one of the next five years, and the entire five-year period, will be the warmest on record,” the World Meteorological Organization said.
The probability that the global average annual surface temperature will be 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial level during at least one of the next five years is 66%, according to the organization.
And Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, confirmed in a statement that the figures published last Wednesday “do not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5 ° C threshold of the Paris Agreement, which indicates prolonged warming over many years.”
“However, the World Meteorological Organization is sounding the alarm by announcing that the 1.5°C threshold will be crossed temporarily, and with greater frequency,” he added.
“It is expected that the El Niño phenomenon will develop in the coming months. Together with human-caused climate change, this phenomenon will raise global temperatures to unprecedented levels,” he added.
And he stressed the need to prepare because the repercussions of this “on health, food security, water management and the environment will be great.”
El Niño is a natural climatic phenomenon generally associated with higher temperatures, increased drought in some parts of the world and heavy rains in others.
This phenomenon last occurred in 2018-2019 and was replaced by a long round of El Niña, which causes adverse effects, especially lower temperatures.
Despite this moderating effect, the past eight years have been the hottest on record.
Without El La Niña, climate warming would be even worse.
In early May, the World Meteorological Organization estimated that there is a 60% chance that the El Niño phenomenon will form by the end of next July, and 80% by the end of September 2023.
The effects of El Niño appear on temperatures in the year following the formation of this climate phenomenon, and its impact is likely to be felt in a greater form in 2024, according to the organization.
“Global average temperatures are expected to continue to rise, taking us further and further away from the climate we are used to,” said Leon Ermanson, a global expert at Britain’s National Meteorological Service.
The World Meteorological Organization’s forecasts for this year were issued by 145 members from 11 different institutes.
“Confidence in projections of global average temperature is high, because ex post projections reveal that all measures are very reliable,” the organization said.
The global mean surface and sea temperatures have been rising continuously since the sixties of the last century.
It is expected that the global average land and sea surface temperatures in 2023 will be higher than the average between 1991 and 2020 in almost all regions of the world, with the exception of Alaska, South Africa, South Asia and some parts of Australia, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Parts of the South Pacific are likely to be colder than average for this part of the Earth.
