The year 2023 broke all unwanted records as the planet's average annual temperature exceeded pre-industrial levels by 1.45 degrees Celsius.
The WMO reiterated data provided by the European drought observatory Copernicus, along with a warning that the Earth is approaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius increase limit, which is the danger level set by the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The WMO’s warning clearly states a 66% likelihood that the annual average global temperature from 2023 to 2027 will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Head of the climate monitoring and policy development department at WMO, Omar Baddour, said if greenhouse gas emission parameters remain unchanged, the world will face a global climate increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius every year, by the late 2040s.
These sad records can be explained by three parameters, including the volume of greenhouse gas emissions, the El Nino climate phenomenon starting in the spring of 2023, and the Tonga volcano eruption in the Pacific Ocean, which began at the beginning of 2022, and a huge amount of hot steam is still coming out of the volcano. This hot water vapour rises and cools in the stratosphere, creating a greenhouse effect that contributes to global warming.
According to forecasts by climate scientists, the El Nino effect will peak in January and will continue until spring 2024.
Normally, after the peak, this phenomenon has the greatest impact on temperature, so experts said the weather in 2024 will be hotter than in 2023.
This complex climate phenomenon affects all regions of the world but has opposite effects. Expert Omar Baddour explained that in the East Africa of the intertropical region, the weather is very clear with heavy rainfall and the risk of strong floods. In contrast, southern Africa or Brazil in Latin America will face severe drought.
The contrary and unpredictable impact of climate is very worrying because it threatens to kill many people and leave lasting socio-economic consequences.
The world cannot forget the record disasters in history, most recently the floods in Libya caused by Storm Daniel, which killed more than 10,000 people in 2023. The consequences of the floods are still deeply imprinted on the faces of millions of Libyans and will continue to affect the socio-economic development, as well as the lives of the people of this North African country for many upcoming years.
It is also impossible not to mention the raging forest fires from the US and Canada in North America, Greece and Spain in Europe, Tunisia in North Africa, and Australia in Oceania.
In 2023, forest fires destroyed nearly 400 million hectares of forest land globally, causing the most casualties since the beginning of the 21st century, with 250 deaths and generating 6.5 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions.
According to Pauline Vilain-Carlotti, a researcher on geography and forest fires, the forest fires in 2023, with the main cause stemming from unusual heat, are beyond human prediction and control. The forest fires in the Americas in 2023 caused the highest damage in history, destroying nearly 80 million hectares of forests on this continent. According to the Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS), this damage figure is 1.5 times higher than the area of Spain and 10 million hectares higher than the average during the same period of 2021-2022.
Among the forest fires that caused large casualties, the forest fire in Hawaii (USA) in August 2023 left 97 people dead and 31 people missing. The above death toll made this forest fire the worst natural disaster in Hawaii's history, surpassing the tsunami that claimed the lives of 61 people in 1960.
Canada also experienced a bad year with 6,400 large and small forest fires, causing more than 200,000 people to evacuate and 18 million hectares of forest land burned. Greece became the focus of forest fires in Europe due to the impact of dry weather and prolonged heat, burning about 150,000 hectares of forest, causing 26 deaths and thousands evacuating.
The WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo stated that extreme weather patterns due to increasing and alarming climate change originate from human activities that damage nature. He called on the world to make more efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming, thereby reducing devastating natural disasters in the future.
