5-year period ending 2019 on pace to be hottest

The world needs to dramatically ramp up action to prevent a climate disaster, with the five-year period ending 2019 set to be the hottest on record, a UN report said Sunday.

A World Meteorological Organization report released a day before world leaders gather in New York for a special UN climate summit said that the world has warmed already by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels and warming is accelerating.

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In the five-year period from 2015-2019, the temperature "is currently estimated to be 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial (1850-1900) times and 0.2 degrees Celsius warmer than 2011-2015," it said.

The four-year period from 2015-2018 was already the hottest since record keeping started in 1850.

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The 2015 Paris climate agreement committed countries to set national targets to reduce their emissions in order to limit a temperature rise of either 2 degrees Celsius or 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But the new weather agency report found that even if countries hit their targets the world will still warm by 2.9 degrees Celsius to 3.4 degrees Celsius.

"There is a growing recognition that climate impacts are hitting harder and sooner than climate assessments indicated even a decade ago," the 28-page report said.

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Current efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would need to be tripled to avoid a 2-degree Celsius temperature rise and must increase fivefold to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the report said.

cw/jlw (AFP, AP)

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