UN Climate Report | Indicators higher than ever

Sea level rise, concentration of greenhouse gases, global temperature: the main indicators of climate change are higher than ever. A new UN report released on Wednesday once again sounds the alarm about “humanity’s failure” against the environmental crisis.

Henri Ouellette-Vezina
The Press

“Humanity’s Greatest Challenge”

“The global energy system is broken and bringing us ever closer to climate catastrophe,” warned UN Secretary-General António Guterres, calling on the world to “end fossil fuel pollution and to accelerate the transition to renewable energies”. In a press conference, the head of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Petteri Taalas, he worried that the war in Ukraine had eclipsed climate change, which “remains the greatest challenge for humanity”.

Sea level rising sharply

Sign of the seriousness of the situation, sea level rise is accelerating at a rate of about 3.33 mm per year. Between 2013 and 2022, it has also jumped by 4.5 mm annually with a peak in 2021, against 2.1 mm between 1993 and 2002. At present, the sea level is around 100 mm above normal, compared to the early 1990s. Ocean temperatures also reached a record high last year.

Hot, very hot years

We learn in the report that the last seven years have been the hottest on record in the world. The year 2021 has also been one of the most critical, with an average global temperature of around 1.11°C above pre-industrial levels. In early April, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in a new report that limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C is still possible if global emissions of greenhouse gases peak by 2025 at the latest.

“Not surprising”

For Damon Matthews, professor at the Climatology Research Chair at Concordia University, such data are “not surprising”. “Despite all the discussions and the efforts that are made, the problem of climate change is not really taken seriously yet,” he says. “It shows once again that we are not working hard enough yet. There has been progress in several areas, but it will take a lot more to resolve the crisis”, assesses the expert, for whom it takes above all political courage to “stop not wanting to bully the fossil industry”.

GHGs are skyrocketing

413.2. This is the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air that the world reached in 2020, a record never established which represents approximately 149% of the emissions observed before industrialization. And this figure seems to have continued to increase in 2021 and at the beginning of 2022. Mr. Taalas also confirmed that the confinements associated with the health crisis ultimately had no impact on the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Pollution and deaths

A study of the scientific magazine The Lancet revealed this week that pollution caused nearly 9 million deaths a year on the planet, as of 2019. Four years after an initial report, the situation has therefore not changed: approximately one in six premature deaths worldwide is related to pollution. Unsurprisingly, low- and middle-income countries bear the brunt of the repercussions, concentrating 92% of these deaths and most of the resulting economic losses.

With Agence France-Presse