In the next five years, Earth is overwhelmingly likely to surge again and again past the international climate threshold set as safe and shatter its hottest-year record along the way, according to new United Nations climate projections.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) also forecasts an overheating Arctic that warms nearly 1.66°C between now and 2030 and a dangerous drought with potential wildfires for the Amazon, a crucial part of Earth’s natural defences to lessen human-caused climate change.
Projections by the UN climate agency and the UK's Meteorological Office say there’s a 75 per cent chance that the average global temperature between 2026 and 2030 will exceed 1.5°C since pre-industrial times. That threshold is the agreed-upon limit of warming, averaged over 20 years, set in 2015 by the Paris climate agreement.
How hot will the next five years become?
There’s a 91 per cent chance that at least one of the next five years will shoot past the 1.5°C threshold and an 86 per cent chance that one of those years will smash the record for Earth’s hottest year set in 2024, the WMO report warns.
The WMO also projects that each year between now and 2030 will be between 1.3°C and 1.9 °C since the late 1800s.
“It’s important to note that [1.5°C] is not kind of a cliff edge that we’re going to fall off,” says report co-author Melissa Seabrook, a climate scientist at the UK's Met Office. “Every kind of 0.1 of a degree has more and more severe impact.”
'A whole range of extreme weather events'
A UN science report a few years later detailed how exceeding that 1.5 mark means more likely death, danger and species loss. Even though it’s only a few tenths of a degree, some of the planet’s ecosystems, such as coral and glaciers, can’t handle the strain.
Climate scientist Friederike Otto from Imperial College London, who wasn't part of the WMO report, warns that an entire year or more above 1.5°C will come with a "whole range of extreme weather events that exceeds anything we've experienced in the past" - and cities are woefully unprepared.
Many people will lose their lives, We're in for a lot of food price shocks and more intense wildfires.Friederike Otto Professor of Climate Science at Imperial College London
Europe has already been urged by the UN to "kick the fossil fuel addiction" as huge parts of the continent continue to swelter under blistering temperatures. Both France and the UK declared the hottest day in May on record this week, with even cooler regions like Oslo experiencing temperatures much higher than the climatological normal for this time of year.
“This record-breaking heat has the fingerprints of climate change all over it,” says Otto.
“Temperatures on this scale were once exceptional even at the height of summer. Seeing 35°C in the UK during spring is absolutely astonishing, but the science is very clear – climate change makes these heatwaves hotter, longer and far more frequent.”
Is El Niño to blame for record heat?
Nearly all the shorter-term forecasts call for a strong El Niño – a natural warming of parts of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide and spikes global temperatures – to form soon.
The WMO report says it could stretch all the way to 2028. Because of that, Seabrook said 2027 will likely break the 2024 heat record.
A strong El Niño "can have a major effect on wildfire risk later in the year", says Dr Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London. "Whilst in many parts of the world the global fire season is yet to heat up, this rapid start in combination with the forecast El Niño means that we could be looking at a particularly severe fire year."
Wildfires don't just kill people in the moment, they impact air quality for hundreds of kilometres around leading to many different health problems. For example, the Australian wildfires in 2019 killed 33 people, but their smoke caused 417 excess deaths and thousands of hospitalisations for six months afterwards.
Some meteorologists predict that a typical El Niño event tends to cause a temporary 0.1-0.2℃ increase in the global mean temperature. However, this is not as significant as temperature rises fuelled by human-made climate change, which has pushed the global surface temperature up by approximately 1.3- 1.5℃ compared to pre-industrial levels.
"El Niño is a natural phenomenon," explains Otto. "It comes and goes. Climate change on the contrary gets worse as long as we do not stop burning fossil fuels. So climate change is the reason to freak out."
But while Europe swelters under scorching temperatures, some climate scientists are debating whether global warming is accelerating at all. Seabrook says this is "obviously quite scary", but future temperatures may quash such projections.
Accelerating warmth in the Arctic
It isn't just the Mediterranean basin bracing for more extreme temperatures.
The projections, based on the averaging of about 200 runs of computer simulations using 13 different climate models from various countries, show warming in the Arctic rising 3.5 times faster than the rest of the globe, because there’s less ice and snow that had been reflecting solar radiation to space, Seabrook says.
Winters in the Arctic from 2020 to 2025 on average were 1.2℃ warmer than the 1991-2020 average. The WMO projects the next five winters will average 2.8℃ warmer than that recent normal, Seabrook adds.
The report also forecasts Arctic sea ice to continue to shrink in the summer.
A stark warning for the Amazon
The report calls for even warmer and unusually dry conditions in the Amazon basin, and that could be devastating for both local residents and the planet as a whole.
People rely on the Amazon for water and the hotter, drier conditions should increase wildfire risk, Seabrook says, threatening to turn the Amazon, which now sucks heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, into a region that worsens the problem.
Africa’s Sahel area, which has been extra dry, is likely to get more than normal rain and that could lead to flooding, Seabrook warns.
