CNN: Planet Earth 'Just Failed Its Annual Health Checkup'
CNN reports on this year's "State of the Climate" report from the World Meteorological Organization (the UN agency promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science a d climatology). The report "analyzes a series of global climate indicators — including levels of planet-heating pollution, sea level rise and ocean heat — to understand how the planet is responding to climate change and the impact it is having on people and nature." CNN's conclusion? "The world just failed its annual health checkup."= - Oceans reached record high temperatures, with nearly 60% experiencing at least one marine heatwave. - Global sea levels climbed to the highest on record due to melting glaciers and warming oceans, which expand as they heat up. - Antarctica's sea ice dropped to 1.92 million square kilometers in February 2022, at the time the lowest level on record (the record was broken again this year). - The European Alps saw a record year for glacier melt, with Switzerland particularly badly affected, losing 6% of its glacier volume between 2021 and 2022. - Levels of planet warming pollution, including methane and carbon dioxide, reached record highs in 2021, the latest year for which there is global data... Last year, climate change-fueled extreme weather "affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. In 2022, China had its most extensive and long-lasting drought on record. Droughts also affected East Africa, with more than 20 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia facing acute food insecurity as of January this year. Many western and southern US states experienced significant drought and Europe's punishing heatwave is estimated to have led to 15,000 excess deaths. In Pakistan, record-breaking rainfall left huge swaths of the country underwater, killing more than 1,700 people, with almost 8 million displaced, and causing $30 billion in damages... Last year is unlikely to be an outlier, as temperatures continue their upwards trajectory. The past eight years were the hottest on record, despite three consecutive years of the La Niña climate phenomenon, which has a global cooling effect. The global average temperature last year climbed to about 1.15 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the report, as the world continues its march towards breaching 1.5 degrees of warming for the first time. With the predicted arrival later in the year of El Niño, which brings warmer global temperatures, scientists are deeply concerned that 2023 and 2024 will continue to smash climate records. The hottest year on record, 2016, was the result of a strong El Niño and climate change, said Baddour. "It is only a matter of time before that record is broken...." "The droughts and level of heatwaves that we saw throughout 2022 were quite remarkable," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, told CNN. "This is really a wake up call that climate change isn't a future problem, it is a current problem. And we need to adapt as quickly as possible," she added. Omar Baddour, head of the Climate Monitoring and Policy Division at the WMO, also told CNN that "Communities and countries which have contributed least to climate change suffer disproportionately." And for more bad news, CNN notes a report from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service found Europe experienced its hottest summer ever recorded, unprecedented marine heatwaves in the Mediterranean sea, and widespread wildfires.
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