World temperatures go above 1.5 C warming threshold for a year: climate scientists - Vancouver Sun
World temperatures go above 1.5 C warming for a year: EU scientists | Vancouver Sun
The average temperature for the past 12 months was 1.52 C above pre-industrial times, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
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For the first time on record, global warming has exceeded temperatures of 1.5 C over a 12-month period, European Union climate scientists reported this week.
the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The EU agency blamed human-caused climate change and the El Niño weather phenomenon that warms the Pacific Ocean for driving the record heat over the past year.
Last summer, B.C. had its worst wildfire season, and experts are concerned that this year’s low snowpack could lead to another summer of brutal drought and wildfires. This week, officials with B.C.’s River Forecast Centre said the province’s snowpack is almost 40 per cent lower than normal for this time of year.
Although El Niño has began to weaken in the equatorial Pacific, marine air temperatures in general remained “at an unusually high level” in January, the EU agency added.
Last month, several climate agencies, including Copernicus and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, declared that 2023 was the hottest year on record, at 1.48 C above pre-industrial times, beating the previous record in 2016.
As part of the 2015 Paris Agreement, world leaders pledged to limit temperature rise to 1.5 C, which climate scientists argue to critical to limit disasters like heat waves, floods drought and wildfire. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned the world is not on track to meet those targets.
With files from Nathan Griffiths
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.