The collapse and melting of glaciers is happening continuously. (Representative)
Geneva, Switzerland:
The world’s glaciers melted at a dramatic pace last year and saving them is effectively a lost cause, the United Nations reported Friday, as climate change indicators hit record highs once again.
The past eight years have been the hottest ever recorded, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said, while concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide have reached new peaks.
Launching its annual climate observation, the WMO said, “Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record and the melting of some European glaciers was, literally, off the charts.”
Sea level is also at a record high, rising an average of 4.62 millimeters per year between 2013 and 2022 – twice the annual rate between 1993 and 2002.
Record high temperatures were also recorded in the oceans – where about 90 per cent of the heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse gases is lost.
In the 2015 Paris Agreement, countries agreed to cap global warming at “well below” two degrees Celsius above the average level measured between 1850 and 1900 and, if possible, at 1.5C.
The WMO report said the global average temperature in 2022 was 1.15C above the 1850-1900 average.
The record global average temperatures over the past eight years came despite the cooling effect of the La Niña weather event, which spanned more than half of that period.
The report states that the greenhouse gas concentration has reached a new high in 2021.
Globally, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations reached 415.7 parts per million, or 149 percent of pre-industrial (1750) levels, while methane reached 262 percent and nitrous oxide 124 percent.
Data indicates that they continue to grow in 2022.
lost glacier game
WMO chief Peteri Taalas told a press conference that extreme weather due to greenhouse gas emissions “could continue into the 2060s, independent of our success in climate mitigation”.
“We have already emitted so much, especially CO2 into the atmosphere, that it takes decades to get out of a negative trend in such a phased manner.”
The world’s 40-odd reference glaciers – for which long-term observations exist – saw an average thickness loss of more than 1.3 meters between October 2021 and October 2022 – a much larger loss than the average over the past decade.
The cumulative thickness loss since 1970 is approximately 30 m.
In Europe, the Alps broke records for glacier melt in March 2022 due to a combination of Saharan dust intrusion and heat waves between May and early September.
“We’ve already lost the game of melting glaciers because we already have such a high concentration of CO2,” Talas told AFP.
In the Swiss Alps, “last summer we lost 6.2 percent of glacier mass, the highest amount since records began”.
“This is serious,” he said, explaining that the disappearance of glaciers would limit the supply of freshwater for humans and agriculture, and also damage transport links if rivers became less navigable, calling it “a future a great risk to the
“Many of these mountain glaciers will disappear, and the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers will also continue to shrink on a long-term basis – unless we create a means to remove CO2 from the atmosphere,” he said.
rays of hope
Despite the report’s bad news, Talas said there was cause for some optimism.
He noted that the means of fighting climate change are becoming more affordable, with green energy becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, while the world is developing better mitigation methods.
They said the planet was no longer headed for 3-5C of warming, as predicted in 2014, but was now on track for 2.5-3C of warming.
“In the best case, we will still be able to reach 1.5C of warming, which would be best for the welfare of mankind, the biosphere and the global economy,” the WMO’s secretary-general told AFP.
Talas said 32 countries have reduced their emissions and their economies are still growing.
“There is no longer an automatic correlation between economic growth and emissions growth,” he said.
Unlike world leaders 10 years ago, now “practically all of them are talking about climate change as a serious problem and countries have started taking action”, he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)