World Meteorological Organization issues “Red Alert” over climate change during COP29

World Meteorological Organization issues Red Alert over climate change during COP29

By Mayank Chhaya-

As America gets ready for a new administration studded with aggressive climate change deniers, the 29th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or COP29 has heard its incoming president Mukhtar Babayev lay out a profoundly worrisome threat of rising global temperature.

Babayev also spoke out about the need for a collective quantifiable response to what he calls “climate violence” even while pointing out the need for climate finance.
COP29 has got underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, today.

“We must be totally honest. The U.N. Environmental Programme shows that current policies are leading us to 3 degrees of warming. These temperatures would be catastrophic for billions. We are on the road to ruin. But these are not the future problems. Climate change is already here,” Babayev said.

He said people are “suffering in the shadows…dying in the dark” because of climate change and the world needs more than “compassion, prayers and paperwork.”

To coincide with the start of COP29 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a stunning report painting a dire picture of global climate on all fronts.

The WMO State of the Climate 2024 Update “once again issues a Red Alert at the sheer pace of climate change in a single generation, turbo-charged by ever-increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. 2015-2024 will be the warmest ten years on record; the loss of ice from glaciers, sea-level rise and ocean heating are accelerating; and extreme weather is wreaking havoc on communities and economies across the world.”

From Greenhouse Gases reaching record observed levels in 2023, Ocean heat content being the highest, sea level rise accelerating to glacier loss worsening, Earth is showing great signs of peril.

The January – September 2024 global mean surface air temperature was 1.54 °C (with a margin of uncertainty of ±0.13°C) above the pre-industrial average, boosted by a warming El Niño event, according to an analysis of six international datasets used by WMO.

“Climate catastrophe is hammering health, widening inequalities, harming sustainable development, and rocking the foundations of peace. The vulnerable are hardest hit,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

The report highlights that the ambitions of the Paris Agreement are in great peril.

“As monthly and annual warming temporarily surpass 1.5°C, it is important to emphasize that this does NOT mean that we have failed to meet Paris Agreement goal to keep the long- term global average surface temperature increase to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the warming to 1.5°C,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

“Recorded global temperature anomalies at daily, monthly and annual timescales are prone to large variations, partly because of natural phenomenon such as El Niño and La Niña. They should not be equated to the long-term temperature goal set in the Paris Agreement, which refers to global temperature levels sustained as an average over decades,” she said.

The re-election of President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, is expected to loom over the conference where the victims of this growing climate violence have come together yet again to rescue the planet from an existential and extinction level catastrophe.

At a time like this, the return of derisive climate skeptics in the White House in charge of a country contributing the highest amounts of greenhouse gases is making many at COP29 anxious.