Global warming will likely cross dangerous 1.5 C threshold within 5 years, UN report warns
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The U.N. weather agency has warned that El Niño and human-caused climate change will likely push temperatures into "uncharted territory."
Unprecedented global temperature rises will likely see the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold breached at some point in the next five years, a United Nations (U.N.) report predicts.
El Niño occurs when trade winds, which typically push warm water westwards across the Pacific Ocean from South America to Asia, weaken, keeping more of the warm water in place. This strongly affects climate patterns around the world, making South America wetter and bringing drought (and sometimes famine) to regions such as Australia, Indonesia, Northern China and Northeastern Brazil.
In the U.S., El Niño tends to make northern regions warmer and dryer and southern regions wetter, and because it causes warmer water to spread further and remain near the surface of the ocean, it also heats up the atmosphere around the world.
The chances of higher temperature swings are also increasing: The odds of breaching the 1.5C temperature threshold was near zero in 2015; it rose to 48% in 2022; and is now 66% just a year later.
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The report notes there is only a 32% chance that the five-year mean will exceed the 1.5C threshold, but this average has nonetheless risen dramatically since 2015, when it was near-zero.
"This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5 C level specified in the Paris Agreement, which refers to long-term warming over many years," Taalas said. "However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5 C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency."
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