2023 has just been confirmed as the hottest year on record, with average global temperatures exceeding pre-industrial conditions by 1.48°C, as recently reported by a UN report. Copernicus programme For the European Union. Just one year ago, climate scientists at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), discovered Decadal forecasting system Specific to the centre, they have already been able to predict a high probability that 2023 will be the warmest year since records were obtained.
After the record conditions of 2023, the looming question is what 2024 and beyond will be like. Recently released 10-year projections from the Center for Surface Temperatures reveal that the planet's average annual surface temperatures in 2024 could exceed those in 2023, and will continue to rise in subsequent years as long as greenhouse gas emissions continue.
Climatologists from the Climate Variability and Change (CVC) group of the BSC's Earth Sciences Division have announced their forecasts for the next ten years, i.e. for the period from 2024 to 2033.
The BSC's decadal prediction system predicts that the planet's average annual surface temperature in 2024 will be between 1.43 and 1.69 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels (defined as the average temperature between 1850 and 1900), with a central estimate It is 1.54 degrees Celsius. .
Forecasts in the coming years
This means that temperatures in 2024 will likely be higher than in 2023, and that there is a high probability (74%) that the global average annual temperature will exceed the threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time.
The rise in temperature is mainly due to the continued emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere due to human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
El Niño conditions developing in the Pacific Ocean, which are expected to peak in the winter of 2023 to 2024, are also contributing to exceptionally warm global average temperature conditions.
BSC Researcher Roberto Bilbao“Our decadal forecasting system allows us to forecast both inter-annual changes and long-term warming trends, taking into account the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols, as well as the underlying natural fluctuations of the climate system,” says BSC's chief decadal forecaster.
Surface temperatures are expected to continue to rise over the next ten years in response to continuing greenhouse gas emissions. The BSC forecast system predicts that over the next two decades (2024-2028 and 2029-2033), average global temperatures could reach between 1.49 and 1.79 degrees Celsius, or 1.67 and 1.94 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. respectively.
Even if the average annual temperature exceeds the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2024, this does not necessarily violate the Paris Agreement, which indicates a twenty-year average, but rather indicates that the world is rapidly approaching this threshold. Combining observations over the last 10 years and BSC 10-year forecasts, the average for this 20-year period is 1.41 ± 0.05 °C. This means that we are on the verge of defaulting on the implementation of the Paris Agreement in the coming years.
“Despite possible variations between years, where certain years may be slightly warmer or cooler than previous years, the global climate remains on a worrying warming trajectory, bringing us closer to failing to meet the targets agreed by world leaders in Paris in 2015,” explains the ICREA professor and co-leader of the BSC CVC group, Marcus donut.
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