May 18 – The world’s oceans grew to the warmest and most acidic levels on record last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Wednesday, as United Nations officials warned that the war in Ukraine was affecting the global threaten climate commitments.
The oceans experienced the most striking extremes when the WMO detailed a series of turbulences caused by climate change in its annual State of the Global Climate report. It said melting ice sheets helped push sea levels to new heights in 2021.
“Our climate is changing before our eyes. The heat trapped by man-made greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
The report follows the recent UN climate assessment, which warned that humanity must drastically reduce its greenhouse gas emissions or face increasingly catastrophic changes in the world’s climate. Continue reading
Taalas told reporters there was little airtime on climate challenges as other crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine made headlines.
Selwin Hart, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ special adviser on climate change, criticized countries for not meeting their climate commitments due to the conflict, which has pushed up energy prices and prompted European nations to replace Russia as an energy supplier.
DANGEROUS INCREASE
“We see … a lot of decisions being made by many major economies that, quite frankly, have the potential to secure a high-carbon, high-pollution future and will jeopardize our climate goals,” Hart told reporters.
A bleaching coral is seen where abandoned fishing nets covered it in a reef in the protected area of Ko Losin, Thailand, June 20, 2021. REUTERS/Jorge Silva/File Photo
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On Tuesday, global equity index giant MSCI warned that the world faces a dangerous rise in greenhouse gases if coal is substituted for Russian gas. Continue reading
The WMO report says levels of climate-warming carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere surpassed previous records in 2021.
Globally, the average temperature last year was 1.11 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average – as the world approaches the 1.5 degree threshold, beyond which the effects of warming are expected to become drastic. Continue reading
“It’s only a matter of time before we see another warmest year on record,” Taalas said.
The oceans bear much of the brunt of warming and emissions. Water absorbs about 90% of the heat accumulated on Earth and 23% of carbon dioxide emissions from human activity.
The ocean has warmed at a significantly faster rate over the past 20 years, reaching a new high in 2021, and is expected to get even warmer, the report said. It would probably take centuries or millennia before this change could be reversed.
The ocean is now also the most acidic for at least 26,000 years as it absorbs and reacts with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Sea levels have risen by 4.5 cm (1.8 inches) over the past decade, with the annual increase from 2013 to 2021 more than double the 1993 to 2002 increase.
The WMO also listed individual extreme heat waves, wildfires, floods and other climate-related disasters around the world, noting reports of more than $100 billion in damage.
reporting by Jake Spring and Rachel More; Edited by Katy Daigle and Janet Lawrence