Earth could see more years of extreme heat, top weather experts warn

There's an 80 per cent chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, top weather forecasters say.

Get ready for several years of even more record-breaking heat that pushes Earth to more deadly, fiery and uncomfortable extremes, two of the world’s top weather agencies forecast.

There’s an 80 per cent chance the world will break another annual temperature record in the next five years, and it’s even more probable that the world will again exceed the international temperature threshold set 10 years ago, according to a five-year forecast released Wednesday by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office.

“Higher global mean temperatures may sound abstract, but it translates in real life to a higher chance of extreme weather: stronger hurricanes, stronger precipitation, droughts,” said Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald, who wasn’t part of the calculations but said they made sense. “So higher global mean temperatures translates to more lives lost.”

With every tenth of a degree the world warms from human-caused climate change “we will experience higher frequency and more extreme events (particularly heat waves but also droughts, floods, fires and human-reinforced hurricanes/typhoons),” emailed Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. He was not part of the research.

And for the first time there’s a chance — albeit slight — that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5C (2.7F) and hit a more alarming 2C (3.6F) of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said.

There’s an 86 per cent chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5 degrees and a 70% chance that the five years as a whole will average more than that global milestone, they figured.

The projections come from more than 200 forecasts using computer simulations run by 10 global centers of scientists.

Ten years ago, the same teams figured there was a similar remote chance — about 1% — that one of the upcoming years would exceed that critical 1.5 degree threshold and then it happened last year. This year, a two-degree Celsius above pre-industrial year enters the equation in a similar manner, something UK Met Office longer term predictions chief Adam Scaife and science scientist Leon Hermanson called “shocking.”