Global heat records were “smashed” last year, the UN confirmed Tuesday, with 2023 rounding out the hottest decade on record, as heatwaves stalked oceans and glaciers suffered record ice loss.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization issued its annual State of the Climate report, confirming preliminary data indicating that 2023 was by far the hottest year ever recorded. And it came at the end of “the warmest 10-year period on record”, the WMO report said. UN chief Antonio Guterres said the report showed “a planet on the brink”. “Earth’s issuing a distress call,” he said, pointing out that “fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts”, and warning that “changes are speeding up”.
The WMO said the average near-surface temperature was 1.45 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels last year — dangerously close to the critical 1.5-degree threshold that countries agreed to avoid passing in the 2015 Paris climate accords. “Never have we been so close… to the 1.5C lower limit of the Paris Agreement,” WMO chief Andrea Celeste Saulo warned in a statement.—AFP
