Global warming breaches 1.5°C threshold in summer for 1st time

📈🌡️ Global mean temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees threshold during the first days of June. Monitoring how often and for how long these breaches occur is more important than ever, if we are to avoid more severe consequences of the climate crisis. Read more: https://t.co/j4x3swOxXq pic.twitter.com/5uAZ08LdNJ

— ECMWF (@ECMWF) June 15, 2023

“This threshold was first exceeded in December 2015, and then repeatedly in the northern hemisphere winters and springs of 2016 and 2020,” the ECMWF said in a statement.

The goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement is to ensure that the rise in global mean temperatures, as compared to pre-industrial times, does not exceed 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably be restricted within 1.5 degrees. But the thresholds mentioned in the Paris Agreement are not about daily or even annual global temperatures. Rather, those thresholds refer to long-term warming, meaning global temperatures over a period of 20 to 30 years, on an average, must not exceed 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees Celsius.

Short-term breaches of these thresholds, even a few years at a stretch, are considered inevitable now. In most of the pathways to achieve the Paris Agreement, including those predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world is projected to overshoot the 1.5 degrees threshold before coming back.

In fact, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) had said last month that there was a 66 per cent chance that in one of the next five years (2023-27), annual global temperatures would breach the 1.5 degrees threshold. Last year, it was 1.15 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial times, the WMO said. The warmest ever year, so far, has been 2016 when global mean temperatures were 1.28 degrees Celsius higher. In its statement last month, WMO said it was near certain that one of the next five years (2023-27) would leave 2016 behind.