UN weather agency issues climate 'red alert'

Last year was the warmest 12 months on record, according to the UN weather agency, which issued a "red alert" on Tuesday as it urged the world to sit up and take notice.

The World Meteorological Organization, which aims to provide detailed climate change information and promote international cooperation in the fight against global warming, made the revelation in its State of the Global Climate report for 2023.

Using data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, the United States' National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and four other sources, the WMO said unusually warm weather flared in the middle of last year and has continued ever since.

February was the ninth consecutive month to officially be declared the warmest on record, some 1.77 degrees hotter than the estimated February average between 1850 and 1900, which is used as the preindustrial reference point.

For the year 2023 as a whole, the global temperature was 1.45 degrees above the pre-industrial level.

Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO, said the world has never been closer to the 1.5-degree temperature rise set out in the Paris Agreement as the point at which any rise would become irreversible.

"Climate change is about much more than temperatures," she said. "What we witnessed in 2023, especially with the unprecedented ocean warmth, glacier retreat and Antarctic sea ice loss, is cause for particular concern… The WMO community is sounding the red alert to the world."

The volume of global sea ice recorded last month was the fourth-smallest in the 46 years that records have been kept, she said. The ice was also particularly hard-hit last year in the Antarctic region, where it was 958,295 square kilometers smaller than its average size, which amounted to the second-smallest mass ever recorded.

The WMO said sea levels have been rising as a result, with them edging up by an average of 3.34 millimeters a year in the past 30 years.

Antonio Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said the latest global climate report, with its accounts of heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires and intense tropical cyclones, shows a planet on the brink.

"Sirens are blaring across all major indicators," Guterres said. "Some records aren't just chart-topping, they're chart-busting. And changes are speeding up."

The WMO report said the changing global climate has contributed to the fact that the number of people going hungry around the world has more than doubled in the past four years, with the 149 million people classed as "acutely food insecure" in 2019 having risen to 333 million today.