World likely to blast beyond grim warming milestone in the next five years, UN weather agency says

The United Nations weather agency on Wednesday said the world is likely to briefly climb above a critically important warming threshold within the next five years, reinforcing the urgent need to slash planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

In a landmark report timed to coincide with World Environment Day, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said there is now an 80% chance that global average temperatures will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels for at least one year between 2024 and 2028.

That’s a stark change from 2015, when the WMO considered the prospect of temporarily overshooting 1.5 degrees Celsius close to zero.

The 1.5 degrees Celsius limit is the aspirational target of the landmark Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change that was adopted in 2015.