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2019 Wraps Up The Hottest Decade In Recorded Human History
Eric Mack, Dec 3, 2019, 12:48pm, Forbes Science
With the COP25 international climate change convention underway this week in Madrid, the United Nations announced that the decade of the 2010s now coming to an end was the warmest in recorded history.
“Since the 1980s, each successive decade has been warmer than any preceding decade since 1850,” the World Meteorological Organization wrote in its provisional “State of the Global Climate” report for 2019.
It also appears that 2019 will wind up as either the second or third warmest year on record. This would mean that all of the ten warmest years on record have come since 2005, with eight of the top ten occurring in the decade now ending.
“Once again in 2019, weather and climate related risks hit hard. Heatwaves and floods which used to be “once in a century” events are becoming more regular occurrences,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas. “Countries ranging from the Bahamas to Japan to Mozambique suffered the effect of devastating tropical cyclones. Wildfires swept through the Arctic and Australia.”
The report claims that by the end of December, up to 22 million people worldwide could be displaced by weather extremes in 2019 alone.
Global average temperature is now over a degree Celsius higher than it was before the industrial revolution. Keeping warming under 2 degrees, which most nations set as a goal under the Paris Agreement, is not looking likely.
“If we do not take urgent climate action now, then we are heading for a temperature increase of more than 3 degrees C by the end of the century, with ever more harmful impacts on human well being,” said Taalas. “We are nowhere near on track to meet the Paris Agreement target.”
Another disturbing development is that the trend line for global hunger has reversed, increasing to affect one in nine humans after a decade of declining. The WMO says drought and floods are largely to blame and both phenomenons are on the increase against the backdrop of warming air and oceans.
“One of the main impacts of climate change is more erratic rainfall patterns. This poses a threat to crop yields and, combined with population increase, will mean considerable food security challenges for vulnerable countries in the future,” Talaas explained.
Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are also now at record levels, meaning that the changes we’re seeing now and for decades to come are all but locked in.
