UN head warns of ‘climate hell’ as May sets temperature record

The United Nation’s secretary general warned of “climate hell” on Wednesday as two new reports show that the planet may warm above the 1.5 C threshold once hoped to not surpass.

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” Antonio Guterres said in a speech. “We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the good news is that we have control of the wheel. The battle to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s – under the watch of leaders today.”

Guterres aimed anger at fossil fuel companies, which he called the “godfathers of climate chaos,” and encouraged media and tech companies to stop taking advertising money from them.

“It’s time to put an effective price on carbon and tax the windfall profits of fossil fuel companies,” he said.

2:00 U.S. heat domes could cause stormy impacts in Canada

His dire words come as the Copernicus Climate Change Service, a global reference for world temperatures managed by the European Union, found that May 2024 was the hottest of that month on record, sitting at an average surface air temperature of 15.9 C, which is 0.65 C hotter than the 1991-2020 average and 1.52 C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.

May 2024 was the 12th consecutive month that broke a temperature record, according to the service’s data, and the 11th consecutive month where global temperatures were 1.5 C at or above pre-industrial levels.

The 1.5 C mark is the amount of warming that countries agreed not to surpass in the Paris Agreement, but the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Wednesday that there is an 80 per cent chance that it will be surpassed in at least one of the next five years.

“What is clear is that the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is hanging on a thread. It’s not yet dead, but it’s hanging by a thread,” WMO deputy secretary-general Ko Barrett said in a press conference.

Exceeding 1.5 C of warming could trigger “multiple climate tipping points,” according to the UN, including the breakdown of major ocean circulation systems, abrupt thawing of boreal permafrost, and the collapse of tropical coral reef systems.

The global average temperature from the last 12 months is now the highest on record, sitting at 0.75 C above the 1991-2020 average and 1.63 C above the pre-industrial average, according to Copernicus.

1:45 Warm weather expected cause in rise of ticks in Calgary area

The WMO reported that the global mean near-surface temperature for each year between 2024-2028 could be between 1.1 C – 1.9 C above the average temperature between 1890-1900.

The report said there is an 86 per cent chance one of the years will beat the current record for warmest year set in 2023, and a 47 per cent chance that the average global temperature in the five years will be 1.5 C above the pre-industrial era. That last stat was at 32 per cent in last year’s report that covered 2023-2027. Going back to 2015, the chance of temperatures rising above 1.5 C in the five subsequent years was about zero, according to the WMO.

Guterres said global emissions of carbon dioxide must fall nine per cent each year to 2030 for the 1.5-degree Celsius target under the Paris climate accords to be kept alive.

— with files from The Associated Press.