UN chief says world is on ‘climate highway to hell’ as planet endures 12 straight months of unprecedented heat | CNN

CNN
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The planet just hit a “shocking” new milestone, enduring 12 consecutive months of unprecedented heat, according to new data from Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service.

Every single month from June 2023 to May 2024 was the world’s hottest such month on record, the Copernicus data showed.

The 12-month heat streak was “shocking but not surprising” given human-induced climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, director of Copernicus, who warned of worse to come. Unless the fossil fuel pollution that is warming the planet is reduced, “this string of hotter months will be remembered as relatively cold,” he said.

Copernicus released its data on the same day that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres gave an impassioned speech in New York on climate change, blasting fossil fuel companies as the “godfathers of climate chaos” and, for once first, explicitly calling on all countries to stop advertising their fossil fuel products.

Guterres urged world leaders to quickly take control of the spiraling climate crisis or face dangerous tipping points. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet,” he said Wednesday. “We need an exit ramp from the freeway to climate hell.”

As temperatures rise, global climate commitments are “hanging by a thread”, he warned.

Copernicus data showed that every month since July 2023 has been at least 1.5 degrees warmer than pre-industrial temperatures, when humans began burning large amounts of planet-warming fossil fuels.

The average global temperature over the past 12 months was 1.63 degrees above these pre-industrial levels.

Under the Paris Agreement in 2015, countries agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. While this target refers to warming over decades, rather than a single month or year, scientists say this breach is an alarming signal.

“This is a harbinger of increasingly dangerous climate impacts on the horizon,” said Richard Allan, a climate professor at the University of Reading in the UK.

The news comes as the western US is experiencing its first heat wave so far this summer with temperatures soaring into the triple digits. But the unprecedented heat has already left a trail of death and destruction across the planet this spring.

Dozens have died in India in recent weeks as temperatures soared to 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit); brutal temperatures in Southeast Asia have caused deaths, school closures and shrinking crops; and as the heat grew in Mexico, howler monkeys fell dead from the trees.

Hotter air and oceans also fuel heavier rainfall and destructive storms like those that have hit the United States, Brazil, Kenya and the United Arab Emirates, among other nations, this year.

The recent heat provides “a window into a future of extreme heat that challenges the limits of human survival,” said Ben Clarke, a researcher at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute. “It is vital that people understand that every tenth of a degree of warming exposes more people to dangerous and potentially deadly heat,” he told CNN.

“Extreme events caused by climate chaos are piling up, destroying lives, battering economies and harming health,” Gutteres said.

Humanity has a great influence on world, he said, comparing it to the meteor that started the dinosaur extinction process 66 million years ago.

“In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs,” Guterres said. “We are the meteor. We are not alone in danger. We are the danger.”

Global temperatures are expected to start falling below record levels in the coming months as El Niño – a natural climate phenomenon that tends to raise the planet’s average temperature – weakens.

But that doesn’t mean an end to the long-term trend of rising temperatures as humans continue to burn fossil fuels that warm the planet. “While this sequence of record months will eventually end, the overall signature of climate change remains and there is no sign on the horizon of a change in such a trend,” Buontempo said.

Guterres’ speech also referred to new data released by the World Meteorological Organization, which found a nearly 86% chance that at least one of the years between 2024 and 2028 will break the record for the hottest year, set in 2023.

The WMO also calculated a nearly 50% chance that average global temperatures over the entire five-year period between 2024 and 2028 would be more than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. This would bring the world closer to breaching the long-term limit of 1.5 degrees at the heart of the Paris Agreement.

Guterres laid the blame for the climate crisis squarely at the doorstep of fossil fuel companies that “make record profits and enjoy trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said.

These companies have spent billions of dollars over decades “distorting the truth, deceiving the public and sowing suspicion,” he added. He called on every country to ban fossil fuel advertising, similar to advertising bans implemented around the world for other products that harm human health, such as tobacco.

“We are at a moment of truth,” he said, adding that the battle for a habitable planet would be won or lost in this decade.

He called on world leaders to take immediate action, including major cuts in planet-warming pollution and an immediate end to any new coal projects. It pushed rich countries to commit to leaving coal by 2030, reducing oil and gas by 60% by 2035 and increasing the flow of finance to the poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries.

“We cannot accept a future where the rich are protected by air-conditioned bubbles while the rest of humanity is buffeted by deadly weather on unlivable lands,” Guterres said.