UN chief Antonio Guterres said the global energy system is broken. (File)
Geneva:
Four key climate change indicators have all reached new record highs in 2021, the United Nations said on Wednesday, warning that the global energy system was propelling humanity toward catastrophe.
Greenhouse gas concentrations, sea level rise, ocean heat and ocean acidification all set new records last year, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its “State of the Global Climate in 2021” report.
The annual review is “a bleak litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said. “The global energy system is broken and bringing us ever closer to a climate catastrophe. We must end fossil fuel pollution and accelerate the transition to renewable energy before burning our only home.”
The WMO said human activity is causing planetary-scale changes on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere, with damaging and long-lasting effects on ecosystems.
Record heat
The report confirmed that the past seven years were the top seven warmest years on record.
Back-to-back La Nina events at the beginning and end of 2021 had a cooling effect on global temperatures last year.
Still, it was still one of the warmest years on record, with an average global temperature in 2021 about 1.11 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change, countries agreed to limit global warming to “well below” 2C above the average level measured between 1850 and 1900 – and 1.5C if possible.
“Our climate is changing before our eyes,” said WMO chief Petteri Taalas.
“The heat held by man-made greenhouse gases will warm the planet for many generations to come. Sea level rise, ocean heat and acidification will continue for hundreds of years unless means are invented to remove carbon from the atmosphere.”
‘Consistent picture of a warming world’
Four key indicators of climate change “build a consistent picture of a warming world affecting all parts of the Earth’s system,” the report said.
Greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new global high in 2020, when the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) worldwide reached 413.2 parts per million (ppm), or 149 percent of pre-industrial levels.
Data shows they continued to rise in 2021 and early 2022, with monthly average CO2 in Hawaii’s Mona Loa reaching 416.45 ppm in April 2020, 419.05 ppm in April 2021 and 420.23 ppm in April 2022, it said. report.
Global mean sea level reached a new record in 2021, with an average rise of 4.5 millimeters per year from 2013 to 2021, the report said.
GMSL rose 2.1mm per year between 1993 and 2002, with the increase between the two time periods “mainly due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets,” it said.
Signs in the seas
Ocean heat reached an all-time high last year, surpassing its 2020 value, the report said.
The ocean’s top 2,000 meters are expected to continue to warm in the future — “a change that is irreversible on centenarian to millennial timescales,” the WMO said, adding that the heat has permeated ever deeper levels.
The ocean absorbs about 23 percent of the annual emissions of man-made CO2 into the atmosphere. While this slows the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, CO2 reacts with seawater and leads to ocean acidification.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with “very confident” that open ocean surface acidity has been highest “for at least 26,000 years.”
Meanwhile, the report said the ozone hole in Antarctica reached an “unusually deep and large” maximum area of 24.8 million square kilometers in 2021, propelled by a strong and stable polar vortex.
Guterres proposed five actions to jump-start the transition to renewable energy “before it’s too late”.
Among other things, he proposed ending fossil fuel subsidies, tripling investments in renewable energy and making renewable energy technologies, such as battery storage, freely available global public goods.
“If we act together, the transformation of renewable energy can be the peace project of the 21st century,” Guterres said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
