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'Sirens Are Blaring': WMO Says 2023 Shattered Key Climate Metrics
"Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said.
Mar 19, 2024
Last year broke records for several key climate indicators, including surface temperatures, ocean heat, sea-level rise, and the loss of Antarctic sea ice, the World Meteorological Organization found in its State of the Global Climate 2023 report, released Tuesday.
The agency confirmed that 2023 was the hottest year on record and said it gave an "ominous" new meaning to the phrase "off the charts."
"Earth is issuing a distress call," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in a video statement. "The latest State of the Global Climate report shows a planet on the brink. Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts. Sirens are blaring across all major indicators."
"The climate crisis is THE defining challenge that humanity faces and is closely intertwined with the inequality crisis."
2023 saw an average global near-surface temperature of 1.45°C, the report found, making 2023 the hottest on record and the cap on the warmest 10-year period on record.
"Never have we been so close—albeit on a temporary basis at the moment—to the 1.5°C lower limit of the Paris agreement on climate change," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. "The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world."
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service and European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts had found separately that January 2024 capped a 12-month period that exceeded the 1.5°C target for the first time.
2023 was also a particularly alarming year for ocean heat, with nearly a third of the ocean in the midst of a marine heatwave at any time during the year. Global sea-surface temperatures reached record heights for April and every month after, with July, August, and September especially hot. Ocean heat content also broke records, and more than 90% of the ocean experienced a heatwave for at least a portion of the year.
The world's glaciers and sea ice did not fare any better. Glaciers lost the most ice in any year since record-keeping began in 1950, and Antarctica's sea-ice extent at the end of winter smashed the previous record by 1 million square kilometers.
"Because of burning fossil fuels, which leads to CO2-induced global heating, we have impacted the polar regions to such a degree that 2023 saw by far the greatest loss of sea ice in the Antarctic and of land ice in Greenland," University of Exeter polar expert Martin Siegert told Common Dreams. "The world will feel the detrimental effects now and into the future because the changes observed will lead to 'feedback' processes encouraging further change."
"Our only response must be to stop burning fossil fuels so that the damage can be limited," Siegert added. "That is our best and only option."
2023 also saw record sea-level rise and ocean acidification.
"Climate change is about much more than temperatures," Saulo said. "What we witnessed in 2023, especially with the unprecedented ocean warmth, glacier retreat, and Antarctic sea ice loss, is cause for particular concern."
Records were broken too for the main cause of all this warming and melting—the levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide all reached record levels in 2022, and data indicates that the atmospheric concentrations of all three continued to rise in 2023, with carbon dioxide levels 50% higher than before the industrial revolution.
The report also considered the impacts of global heating on extreme weather events: 2023 saw several especially devastating climate-fueled disasters, including lethal flooding from Cyclone Daniel in Libya; Tropical Cyclone Mocha, which displaced 1.7 million people in the region around the Bay of Bengal; an extreme heatwave in southern Europe and North Africa; a record wildfire season in Canada that smothered several North American cities in heavy smoke; and the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than 100 years in Hawaii.
In addition to claiming lives and forcing people from their homes, these disasters have several other impacts on peoples' well-being. For example, the report noted that the number of people suffering from acute food insecurity had shot up to 333 million in 2023, more than two times the 149 million before the pandemic. While the root causes of this are war and conflict, economic downturns, and high food prices, extreme weather events can make the situation worse. When Cyclone Freddy, one of the longest-lasting cyclones ever, struck Madagascar, Mozambique, and Malawi in February, it flooded vast swaths of agricultural fields and damaged crops in other ways.
"The climate crisis is THE defining challenge that humanity faces and is closely intertwined with the inequality crisis—as witnessed by growing food insecurity and population displacement, and biodiversity loss," Saulo said.
Guterres, meanwhile, said the impact of extreme weather on sustainable development was "devastating."
"Every fraction of a degree of global heating impacts the future of life on Earth," he said.
There was some positive news in the report, mainly that renewable energy increased new capacity by nearly 50% in 2023 compared with 2022, the highest rate of increase in 20 years. Global climate finance nearly doubled from 2019-2020 to almost $1.3 trillion, but this was still only 1% of global gross domestic product.
To have a shot at limiting warming to 1.5°C, finance needs to increase by nearly $9 trillion by 2030 and another $10 trillion by 2050, but this is much lower than the estimated cost of doing nothing, which would be $1,266 trillion from 2025-2100, though the WMO said this was likely a "dramatic underestimate."
Guterres said it was still possible to limit long-term global temperature rise to 1.5°C, but it required swift action; leadership from the G20 nations toward a just energy transition; countries proposing 1.5°C-compliant climate plans by 2025; increased climate finance flows toward the developing world, including for adaptation and Loss and Damage; universal coverage by early warning systems by 2027; and "accelerating the inevitable end of the fossil fuel age."
"There's still time to throw out a lifeline to people and planet," Guterres said, "but leaders must step up and act now."
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Global South Saw More Than 90% of All Extreme Weather Deaths in Last 51 Years: UN Agency
The findings from a World Meteorological Organization report released Monday are another example of how those who did the least to cause the climate crisis are most vulnerable to its impacts.
May 22, 2023
More than 90% of the people killed in extreme weather events during the last half-century lived in the Global South, a new World Meteorological Organization report has found.
The figure came from an update Monday to the World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate, and Water-related Hazards to cover the years 1970 to 2021. The U.N. agency counted a total of 11,778 extreme weather, climate, or water-related disasters during that time period, which claimed more than two million deaths and cost $4.3 trillion in economic losses.
"The most vulnerable communities unfortunately bear the brunt of weather, climate and water-related hazards," WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas said in a statement.
\u201cExtreme weather, climate and water-related events caused 11 778 reported disasters between 1970 and 2021, with just over 2 million deaths and US$ 4.3 trillion in economic losses, according to new figures presented to #MeteoWorld.\nhttps://t.co/nghvQG67OY\u201d— World Meteorological Organization (@World Meteorological Organization) 1684741218
While more than 60% of the economic losses caused by these storms occurred in developed nations—with 39% occurring in the U.S. alone—developing nations were disproportionately harmed financially relative to the size of their economies. None of the events in the Global North cost a country more than 3.5% of its gross domestic product (GDP), and over four-fifths of these disasters cost less than 0.1% of GDP. In Least Developed Countries, however, 7% of the disasters took out a more than 5% chunk of their GDPs, and some cost them as much as 30%. Small Island Developing States were hit especially hard, with 20% of disasters having an impact worth more than 5% of their GDPs and some costing more than 100% of local GDP.
Taalas offered the example of Cyclone Mocha, which bore down on the world's largest refugee camp in the Bangladeshi city of Cox's Bazar on May 14. The Category 5 storm killed at least 145 people in Myanmar and destroyed thousands of shelters in the Cox's Bazar refugee camp, BBC News reported.
"It caused widespread devastation in Myanmar and Bangladesh, impacting the poorest of the poor," Taalas said.
In general, Asia accounted for 47% of all reported deaths from extreme weather events, and tropical cyclones were the leading cause. Of Asia's 984,263 deaths, Bangladesh accounted for more than half of them at 520,758—the highest death toll for any nation in the region and a higher number than the total death toll for the regions of Europe; North America, Central America, and the Caribbean; South America; and the South-West Pacific.
"Both vulnerability to current climate extremes and historical contribution to climate change are highly heterogeneous with many of those who have least contributed to climate change to date being most vulnerable to its impacts."
The findings are a clear example of climate injustice—as those who did the least to contribute to the crisis disproportionately suffer its impacts. All of the disasters considered in the study—droughts, extreme temperatures, flooding, glacial lake outbursts, landslides, storms, and wildfires—are becoming more extreme, more frequent, or both because of climate change due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels, and their impacts are not evenly distributed.
"Both vulnerability to current climate extremes and historical contribution to climate change are highly heterogeneous with many of those who have least contributed to climate change to date being most vulnerable to its impacts," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in its most recent Synthesis Report.
In 2009, developed nations pledged $100 billion a year through 2020 to help developing nations both adapt to the climate crisis and reduce their emissions, as Eurodad explained in a 2022 analysis. The 2020 deadline was later extended to 2025. However, as of 2020, nearly 50% of the promised amount had not been paid.
The most recent U.N. Adaptation Gap Report moreover found that the money the Global North is sending to the Global South to help it adapt is five to 10 times below what it actually needs.
At 2022's COP27, wealthier nations agreed to a second Loss and Damage fund to help poorer nations pay for the inevitable harms already caused by the climate crisis. However, in a peer-reviewed paper published in One Earth on Friday, Marco Grasso and Richard Heede argued that the lengthy process involved in organizing and financing such an agreement—as well as the delay in other climate finance—meant that major fossil fuel companies should step in to help foot the bill.
"The recent progress in climate attribution science makes it evident that these companies have played a major role in the accumulation and escalation of such costs by providing gigatonnes of carbon fuels to the global economy while willfully ignoring foreseeable climate harm," Grasso and Heede wrote. "All the while they successfully shaped the public narrative on climate change through disinformation, misleading 'advertorials,' lobbying, and political donations to delay action directly or through trade associations and other surrogates. Fossil fuel companies have a moral responsibility to affected parties for climate harm and have a duty to rectify such harm."
\u201c#BigOil knew about climate change, but failed to act. How much do the biggest fossil fuel companies owe the world in reparations? Important new Commentary from @MGGrasso and @rickheede. Read (Open Access!) here: https://t.co/iEbrTCZBzz\u201d— One Earth (@One Earth) 1684510048
The two authors calculated that the top 21 fossil fuel companies owed a total of $5.4 trillion in reparations from 2025 to 2050, with Saudi Aramco, Russia's Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP owing the most.
"The analysis offers a starting point for much needed action to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their financial responsibilities," Greenpeace International general counsel Kristin Casper said in response to the findings. "Now, communities on the frontline of environmental breakdown can decide how to wield the study's powerful findings in their own struggles for justice."
There was some good news in the WMO report. While the yearly cost of extreme weather disasters has increased over the last 51 years, the death toll has decreased due to early warning systems. For example, Cyclone Nargis in 2008 killed 138,366 people in Myanmar and Bangladesh, a toll much higher than Mocha's.
"Thanks to early warnings and disaster management these catastrophic mortality rates are now thankfully history," Taalas said. "Early warnings save lives."
The WMO published its findings to coincide with the World Meteorological Congress, which launched Monday with a talk on extending early warning systems to every country on Earth by 2027, a goal spearheaded by U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. Currently, these systems only cover around half of all countries, and Small Island Developing States, Least Developed Countries, and Africa nations are especially left out.
"Delivering #EarlyWarningsForAll can be the game changer to address the massive injustice of loss that communities face from the climate crisis," Jagan Chapagain, secretary general and CEO of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said at the conference.
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