Global temperature may temporary breach 1.5C in next five years – UK Met Office

The Meteorological Office (Met Office), a UK national weather service stated in a new report that there is a 50 percent chance the world may temporarily breach 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the next five years.

Last year’s assessment indicated that there was a 40 percent chance of the temperature temporarily exceeding 1.5°C between 2021-2025.

Leon Hermanson, of the Met Office, said: “Our latest climate predictions show that continued global temperature rise will continue, with an even chance that one of the years between 2022 and 2026 will exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

“A single year of exceedance above 1.5°C does not mean we have breached the iconic threshold of the Paris Agreement, but it does reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5°C could be exceeded for an extended period,” he noted.

In 2021, the global average temperature was 1.1 °C above the pre-industrial baseline, according to the provisional WMO report on the State of the Global Climate.

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The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, produced with WMO highlights that there is a 93 percent chance that the five-year average global temperature for (2022-2026) will be higher than the average for the last five years (2017-2021).

Other findings by the organisation include: that the annual mean global near-surface temperature for any year in the next five years is predicted to be between 1.1°C and 1.7°C higher than pre-industrial levels.

Also, the chance of at least one year exceeding 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels between 2022-2026 is about as likely as not (48 percent).

However, there is only a very small chance (10 percent) of the five-year mean exceeding this threshold.

The chance of at least one year in the next five years exceeding the current warmest year, 2016, is over 90 percent, the agency said.