- World Meteorological Organisation’s flagship State of the Climate report issued a ‘red alert’ on account of unusually high surface temperatures.
- The abnormal warming this year was boosted by a strong El Nino, and will result in both 2023 and 2024 being the two warmest on record.
- At the COP29, countries are negotiating global climate policies to prevent a long-term, decadal breach of temperatures above 1.5 degrees celsius.
From January to September this year, global mean surface temperatures crossed 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, making it the second year in a row to cross this temperature threshold for a sustained period of time. The World Meteorological Organisation said 2024 was on track to replace 2023 as the hottest year ever, “turbo-charged by ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.”
The announcement of a “red alert” was made in the WMO’s flagship State of the Climate report, which was updated and released on the first day of the COP29, which is ongoing in Baku, Azerbaijan. At the COP, countries are negotiating global climate policies to prevent a long-term, decadal breach of temperatures above 1.5 degrees Celsius. Temperatures have already reached 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Greenhouse gas emissions responsible for causing this global heating need to drop by 42% in the next six years to keep warming within 1.5 degrees. But instead, emissions are expected to reach a record high of 41.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2) – 2% more than 2023 levels.
“The record-breaking rainfall and flooding, rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, deadly heat, relentless drought and raging wildfires that we have seen in different parts of the world this year are unfortunately our new reality and a foretaste of our future,” said Celeste Saulo, WMO Secretary-General, in a statement.
The abnormal warming this year was boosted by a strong El Nino, and will result in both 2023 and 2024 being the two warmest on record. It also marks “the warmest ten years in the 175-year observational record,” the WMO report said, calling it an unprecedented amount of warming “in a single generation.”
For India, this means escalating droughts, floods, heatwaves, and cyclones, among other extreme weather events. As surface temperatures soared to 1.54 degrees above preindustrial levels globally between January and September this year, India witnessed extreme weather events on 255 of the 274 in the same period.
Sea ice and glacier loss
The unusual warming over the last 16 months (from June 2023 to September 2024) has resulted in record lows of sea-ice in the poles, and glacier loss in mountain ranges. The extent of glacier loss, measured as global annual mass balance, was “nominally the largest loss of ice on record,” in 2023 since 1950, the WMO report says. The negative mass balance of 1.2 meters of water equivalent “corresponds to a volume of water discharged by the Amazon River in about one month, or approximately 5 times as much water as there is in the Dead Sea.”
The Antarctic sea-ice extent reached its annual minimum of 2.0 million km on 20 February, the second lowest extent in the satellite record since 1979, the report says. The lowest was in 2023.
Over the last two decades, ocean warming has also shown “a particularly strong increase,” at a rate that corresponds to an average absorption of approximately 3.1 million terawatt-hours (TWh) of heat each year from 2005-2023. This is “more than 18 times the world’s energy consumption in 2023.”
“We urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen our monitoring and understanding of our changing climate,” said Saulo of the WMO, adding, “Whether it is at a level below or above 1.5°C of warming, every additional increment of global warming increases climate extremes, impacts and risks.”
Extreme weather in India
According to the India Meteorological Department, surface temperatures across the country have increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius between 1901 and 2018. Warming trends in India mirrored global levels – the summers of 2023 and 2024 were among the warmest ever.
The Centre for Science and Environment put together a record of extreme weather event days in India, as an attempt to “build an evidence base on the frequency and expanding geography of extreme weather events in India.”
Using data from the IMD, the report found that extreme weather events were recorded on 90% of days in various parts of the country in the first nine months of this year (255 out of 274 days). This resulted in 3,238 human deaths, 3.2 million hectares of crops being affected, 235,862 houses being damaged, and approximately 9,457 livestock being killed.
“India is very active and making good investments to enhance meteorological services. But India being such a large country, there is a lot of scope for improvement. Especially in bringing the meteorological services into the value chain. The active engagement between the met department and other ministries like agriculture, health and disaster management is vital,” Saulo reportedly said at a press conference.
Read more: The climate drivers behind southwest India’s intensifying heat waves
Banner image: A tiger taking a dip in a waterhole in the Ranthambore National Park in Rajasthan. Image by Koshy Koshy via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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