UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that earth is 'on the brink' after the launch of the World Meteorological Organisation's Global Climate Report. weather agency said in its annual State of the Global Climate report that average temperatures hit the highest level in 174 years of record-keeping by a clear margin, reaching 1.45 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
“The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world,” said WMO secretary general Celeste Saulo, who took over the job in January.Australia wanted to catch Chinese spies. Is this really who it had in mind?“What we witnessed in 2023, especially with the unprecedented ocean warmth, glacier retreat and Antarctic sea ice loss, is cause for particular concern.”
“The trend is really very worrying and that is because of the characteristics of water that keep heat content for longer than the atmosphere,” Saulo said.WMO's head of climate monitoring, Omar Baddour, told reporters there was a “high probability” that 2024 would set new heat records, saying that the year after an El Nino was typically warmer still.
That trend, combined with ocean warming which causes water to expand, has contributed to a more than doubling of the rate of sea-level rise over the past decade compared with the 1993-2002 period, it said.