Last eight years revealed as hottest on record as world gathers for critical Cop27

The past eight years have been Earth’s hottest on record, findings revealed, as the critical United Nations climate summit Cop27 gets underway.World leaders and thousands of negotiators, scientists, and activists are gathering in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt for the next two weeks to hash out the global pacts urgently needed to avoid planetary catastrophe. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned this week that the 2020s are a ‘crucial’ decade, ‘when the global climate fight will be won or lost’. Global temperatures increased again in 2022The global carbon footprint must be cut nearly in half by the end of the decade to hold back from dangerous temperature rise. Instead emissions, largely from burning fossil fuels, are increasing. Mr Guterres also called on rich countries to make a ‘historic pact’ with poorer nations to help the most vulnerable survive climate impacts.There are expectations that Cop27 will be one of the most difficult climate summits in years. It comes after a tumultuous 12 months which has seen Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, global energy shortfalls cost of living crises in rich countries and some poorer nations left on the brink of famine.The climate havoc has been relentless. This year alone has seen devastating flooding in Pakistan, persistent drought in the Horn of Africa and southern China; wildfires and deadly heatwaves across Europe, and Hurricane Ian’s decimation of Florida. Millions of lives have been affected with damages running to multi-billions of dollars.The UK saw record temperatures this summer, with green spaces like Greenwich left arrid On Sunday, the provisional report on the ‘State of the Global Climate’ was published by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).It found that this year, the global temperature is estimated to be 1.15 degrees Celsius (1.02 -1.28C) above pre-Industrial times. This 10-year average (from 2013-2022) compares with 1.09C from 2011 to 2020.The year will ‘only’ be the fifth or sixth hottest year, WMO noted, due to the rare triple-dip cooling La Niña. However this won’t reverse the long-term trend, and it’s only a matter of time before the heat record is broken again. ‘The greater the warming, the worse the impacts. We have such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.C of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach,’ said WMO Secretary-General Prof Petteri Taalas.Cop27 President Sameh Shoukry at the opening of the summit on Sunday Among the new findings:Glaciers in the European Alps suffered record melting this year. ‘It’s already too late for many glaciers and the melting will continue for hundreds if not thousands of years, with major implications for water security,’ Taalas noted.Average ice thickness losses of between 3 and over 4 metres were measured throughout the Alps In Switzerland no snow outlasted the summer season for the first time in history – even at the highest pointsThe Greenland ice sheet shrank for the 26th year in a row. Rain fell on the icy expanse, rather than snow, for the first time in SeptemberOcean heat is at record levels and sea levels rose 10mm overall in the past two and a half years, the rate doubling in the past 30 years.’Although we still measure this in terms of millimetres per year, it adds up to half to one meter per century and that is a long-term and major threat to many millions of coastal dwellers and low-lying states,’ Taalas added.In a separate report this week, WMO found that the rate of warming recorded in Europe was the highest of any continent in the world, soaring beyond twice the global average in 30 years.The global temperature is estimated to be 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial times The annual climate summit has the aim of keeping to the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C or ‘well below’ 2C.To do so, countries need to pledge more dramatic emissions cuts – known as ‘Nationally Determined Contributions’ (NDCs) – to cut the global carbon footprint by 45 per cent in 2030, and reaching net zero by 2050.Yet, only 24 out of 194 countries have submitted new or updated NDCs, which they promised to do last year at Cop26 in Glasgow. The total is less than 1 per cent of projected global emissions in 2030, the UN Environment Programme reported last week.’The State of the Global Climate? Parlous. If there was ever a year to swamp, shred and burn off the blinkers of global climate inaction then 2022 should be it,’ said Professor Dave Reay, executive director of Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, University of Edinburgh.’The world now has a monumental job of damage limitation. This includes redoubling efforts to cut emissions and give us more than the cat in hell’s chance we currently have of meeting the Paris Climate Goals. It also means going hard at adaptation, protecting the most vulnerable and embedding climate resilience into every investment, every policy and every community.’At the beginning of the summit, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will unveil WMO’s new plans to provide early warning systems to all countries to help protect people against increasingly extreme weather events. Currently half of countries lack this ability.