UN confirms 2022 among eight hottest years on record
The past eight years were the hottest since records began, even despite the cooling influence of a drawn-out La Nina weather pattern, the United Nations confirmed on Thursday. Last year, as the world faced a cascade of unprecedented natural disasters made more likely and deadly by climate change, the average global temperature was about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the World Meteorological Organization said. "The past eight years were the warmest on record globally, fuelled by ever-rising greenhouse gas concentrations and accumulated heat," the UN agency said in a statement. The hottest year on record was 2016, followed by 2019 and 2020, it found. Last year meanwhile marked the eighth consecutive year that annual global temperatures were at least one degree over the pre-industrial levels seen between 1850 and 1900. The Paris Agreement, agreed by nearly all the world's nations in 2015, called for capping global warming at 1.5C, which scientists say would limit climate impacts to manageable levels. But the WMO warned on Thursday that "the likelihood of – temporarily – breaching the 1.5C limit... is increasing with time." The WMO reached its conclusions by consolidating six leading international datasets, including the European Union's Copernicus climate monitor (C3S) and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which have announced similar findings this week. The UN agency highlighted that the warmest eight years on record had all been since 2015, despite consecutive La Nina events since 2020. The weather phenomenon has a cooling effect on global temperatures. (AFP)