This Friday the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States (NASA) agreed with what was said days before by the Copernicus Climate Change Service: last year there was an increase in the average global temperature close to the limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

About half of the days were more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial level of 1850-1900, and two days in November were two degrees warmer for the first time, with July and August being the months with the greatest heat wave.

The transition from the cooling of La Niña to the warming of El Niño (oscillations with a global impact on the surface temperature of the equatorial Pacific Ocean) by mid-2023 is clearly reflected in the increase in temperature compared to the previous year, commented the secretary General of the WMO, Celeste Saulo.

Since El Niño typically has the biggest impact on global temperatures after peaking, 2024 could be even hotter, she noted.

In her opinion, climate change is the biggest challenge facing humanity, so “we have to make drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate the transition to renewable energy sources,” she said.

Along the same lines, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson assured that “we are facing a climate crisis” that ranges from extreme heat to forest fires and rising sea levels.

He added that such record temperatures coincided with a year of extreme weather conditions around the planet, which, in the United States alone, caused 25 catastrophes, each with damages exceeding one billion dollars.

ef/lam/lpn