Get ready for several years of killer heat, top weather forecasters warn
[May 28, 2025]
By SETH BORENSTEIN
WASHINGTON (AP) — Get ready for several years of even more
record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery and
uncomfortable extremes, two of the world's top weather agencies
forecast.
There's an 80% chance the world will break another annual temperature
record in the next five years, and it's even more probable that the
world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10
years ago, according to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the
World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office.
“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates
in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes,
stronger precipitation, droughts,” said Cornell University climate
scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn't part of the calculations but said
they made sense. “So higher global mean temperatures translates to more
lives lost.”
With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate
change “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events
(particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and
human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” emailed Johan Rockstrom,
director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in
Germany. He was not part of the research.
And for the first time there’s a chance — albeit slight — that before
the end of the decade, the world's annual temperature will shoot past
the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius
(2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6
degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies
said.
There's an 86% chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5
degrees and a 70% chance that the five years as a whole will average
more than that global milestone, they figured.
The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer
simulations run by 10 global centers of scientists.
Ten years ago, the same teams figured there was a similar remote chance
— about 1% — that one of the upcoming years would exceed that critical
1.5 degree threshold and then it happened last year. This year, a
2-degree Celsius above pre-industrial year enters the equation in a
similar manner, something UK Met Office longer term predictions chief
Adam Scaife and science scientist Leon Hermanson called “shocking.”
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Stephanie Touissaint, foreground, uses a fan to keep cool in the
sweltering heat at Eiffel Tower Stadium during a beach volleyball
match between Cuba and Brazil at the 2024 Summer Olympics, July 30,
2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
“It's not something anyone wants to see, but that's what the science
is telling us,” Hermanson said. Two degrees of warming is the
secondary threshold, the one considered less likely to break, set by
the 2015 Paris agreement.
Technically, even though 2024 was 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than
pre-industrial times, the Paris climate agreement’s threshold is for
a 20-year time period, so it has not been exceeded. Factoring in the
past 10 years and forecasting the next 10 years, the world is now
probably about 1.4 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter
since the mid 1800s, World Meteorological Organization climate
services director Chris Hewitt estimated.
“With the next five years forecast to be more than 1.5C warmer than
preindustrial levels on average, this will put more people than ever
at risk of severe heat waves, bringing more deaths and severe health
impacts unless people can be better protected from the effects of
heat. Also we can expect more severe wildfires as the hotter
atmosphere dries out the landscape,” said Richard Betts, head of
climate impacts research at the UK Met Office and a professor at the
University of Exeter.
Ice in the Arctic — which will continue to warm 3.5 times faster
than the rest of the world — will melt and seas will rise faster,
Hewitt said.
What tends to happen is that global temperatures rise like riding on
an escalator, with temporary and natural El Nino weather cycles
acting like jumps up or down on that escalator, scientists said. But
lately, after each jump from an El Nino, which adds warming to the
globe, the planet doesn't go back down much, if at all.
“Record temperatures immediately become the new normal,” said
Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson.
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