BAKU — The world is already becoming dangerously overheated, and climate change is accelerating, says the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), as the COP29 UN Climate Summit kicked off in Azerbaijan's capital city Baku on Monday.
The latest WMO Global State of the Climate report for 2024 shows that the last decade was the warmest on record.
It's exactly what scientists had predicted, according to Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.
"It's not a surprise. And we have to recognise that scientists have been marking this for many years — more than 30 years in fact — and that what is a surprise is the slowness to react," said Saulo.
The WMO report follows the latest data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which last week declared that 2024 will be the hottest year on record.
The UN’s weather experts at the COP29 summit in Baku say that global temperatures have already risen by 1.3 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial average. The world is experiencing unprecedented sea surface temperatures, ice cap melting, droughts, and severe flooding, as recently seen in Spain.
"I think that people are not prepared for events of that nature, that there is a terrible challenge in how to put together protocols that allow people to prepare and react appropriately for the intensity of the phenomena that we are facing," explained Saulo.
Climate experts and attendees of the first day of the COP29 Summit agreed the outlook is grim — greenhouse gas emissions may be falling in Europe, but they are still rising around the globe.
Whether CO2 is released in Beijing, Baku, or Berlin, the result is the same: more heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere lead to higher temperatures, affecting everyone worldwide.
Delegations from countries around the world are expected to come together to try to limit greenhouse gas emissions and, ultimately, global warming.
Last month, average temperatures in Europe reached 10.83°C—1.23°C above the 1991–2020 average, making October the fifth warmest on record and the second-warmest globally. — Euronews
