Get ready for several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery, and uncomfortable extremes, two of the world's top weather agencies forecast. There's an 80% chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, according to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the UK Meteorological Office. And for the first time there's a chance—albeit slight—that before the end of the decade, the world's annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.
The AP has more on the projections, which come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centers of scientists:
- The first 1.5-degree marker: Even though 2024 was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial times, the Paris climate agreement's threshold is for a 20-year time period, so it hasn't been exceeded. Factoring in the past 10 years and forecasting the next 10 years, the world is now probably about 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter since the mid-1800s, WMO climate services director Chris Hewitt estimates.
- The prediction: There's an 86% chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5 degrees, and a 70% chance that the five years as a whole will average more than that global milestone.
- A 'shocking' yet slim possibility: Ten years ago, the same teams figured there was a remote chance—about 1%—that one of the upcoming years would exceed that critical 1.5-degree threshold, and then it happened last year. This year, a 2-degree Celsius shift above preindustrial levels enters the equation in a similar manner, something UK Met Office longer-term predictions chief Adam Scaife and scientist Leon Hermanson call "shocking."
- Standout quote: "It's not something anyone wants to see, but that's what the science is telling us," Hermanson says. Two degrees of warming is the secondary threshold, the one considered less likely to break, set by the 2015 Paris agreement.
- One way to visualize: What tends to happen is that global temperatures rise like riding on an escalator, with temporary and natural El Nino weather cycles acting like jumps up or down on that escalator, scientists say. But lately, after each jump from an El Nino, which adds warming to the globe, the planet doesn't go back down much, if at all. "Record temperatures immediately become the new normal," said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson.
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