30-11-2023 (DUBAI) The United Nations (UN) has officially declared 2023 as the warmest year ever recorded, based on data collected until October. The announcement, made by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a UN agency, on Thursday coincided with the commencement of the COP28 summit in Dubai, where global leaders have gathered to address the pressing issue of climate change. The UN is urgently calling for immediate action to combat global warming in response to the escalating climate crisis.
According to the WMO, 2023 not only shattered previous climate records but also exceeded them significantly, resulting in a series of extreme weather events that caused widespread devastation. “It’s a deafening cacophony of broken records,” remarked Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the WMO.
Taalas highlighted the alarming statistics, stating, “Greenhouse gas levels are at a record high. Global temperatures have reached unprecedented levels. Sea levels are rising at an alarming rate. Antarctic sea ice has reached a record low.” These findings were unveiled as part of the WMO’s preliminary report on the state of the global climate in 2023, coinciding with the ongoing UN Cop28 climate conference, which faces mounting pressure to address the increasing greenhouse gas emissions that are heating our planet.
Antonio Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, described the record-breaking heat as a wake-up call that “should send chills down the spines of world leaders.” Scientists have been consistently warning that the window of opportunity to limit global warming to manageable levels is rapidly closing.
The 2015 Paris climate agreement aimed to keep global warming well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with a target of limiting it to 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, data from 2023 indicates that this year’s average temperature was already approximately 1.4 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline, as revealed by the WMO report.
While the final version of the State of the Global Climate 2023 report is expected to be published in the first half of 2024, the WMO stated that the temperature difference between the first ten months of 2023 and the previous highest-ranking years, 2016 and 2020, is significant enough that the data from the final two months is unlikely to alter this year’s ranking.
Furthermore, the report highlights that the past nine years have been the warmest since modern records began. Taalas warned that these figures are not mere statistics, stressing, “We are at risk of losing the race to save our glaciers and mitigate sea level rise.”
He concluded with a stark warning, stating, “We cannot revert to the climate conditions of the 20th century, but we must take immediate action to minimize the risks associated with an increasingly inhospitable climate in the present and future centuries.”
