Bengaluru: The world recorded the first year of temperatures above 1.5C over pre-industrial levels, and is transitioning towards significantly higher temperatures. The temperatures across the globe between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record, measuring at 1.6 centigrade above pre-industrial levels, data shows.
The findings don’t imply the 1.5C threshold was crossed as that is a long-term average measured over multiple years. They, however, indicate that the earth has already warmed enough to start recording these temperatures, which are only expected to get cumulatively higher as time passes.
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“Based on our emissions trajectories, we are going through the 1.5°C global warming transition in 2020-2040. The IPCC projections indicate that (with current emissions) we will go beyond that to experience a 2°C global warming between 2040 and 2060,” said Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and one of the authors of the latest lPCC report.
The data was released by the European space program’s satellite earth observation system Copernicus Climate Change Service. The system uses billions of data points from satellites and ground monitoring stations, including those on ships and aircraft weather stations.
Like nearly every month in the last one year, June 2024 was hotter than any June on record, and has now become the twelfth consecutive month where temperatures are greater than the 1.5C global average rise compared to pre-1850.
Some data points have low margins and might not align with information collected from other sources, say scientists.
The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), authored by international climate experts, predicted that 1.5C of warming will create food insecurity, loss of basic ecosystems that sustain others like coral reefs, loss of multiple low-lying island nations, increasing frequency of extreme events like cyclones, floods, and drought, and heat stress leading to deaths.
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The next few years are expected to see a continuous rise of temperatures across the globe, with different rates warming faster than others, due to cumulative emissions over the last 100 years. The July 2023 to June 2024 year has already seen record-breaking heat across all continents, with the last winter season being the warmest in recent decades. North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia have broken seasonal temperatures and drought records in multiple countries, which also faced subsequent floods.
Warming temperatures and rising sea levels have a disproportionate effect on poorer countries, with infrastructure designed years and decades ago crumbling in extreme climates. In tropical regions like India, there is expected to be more extreme weather, leading to widespread floods and heatwaves.
Over the Indian Ocean waters, sea-surface temperatures continue to steadily rise, preventing mixing with the lower, cooler waters, and increasing evaporation and humidity in the warm atmosphere.
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“We will see widespread extreme rains causing floods around the monsoon season. With the Indian Ocean continuing to warm at a rapid pace, we will see cyclones undergoing rapid intensification in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal. The storm surges from cyclones will overlap on the steadily rising sea level to cause prolonged floods,” said Koll.
In line with the dichotomy of extremes, the Indian subcontinent and Himalayan regions will also see prolonged droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires. Koll added that this, coupled with pollution, will worsen human health from April to June.
“These overlapping extremes, called compound extremes, will be the monsters of the near future. We need to scale up our adaptation plans accordingly and build resilience keeping these future risks in mind,” he said.
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