Forecast: 40% Chance Earth To Be Hotter Than Paris Climate Agreement Goal Soon

“It’s a warning that we need to take strong action,” said Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom’s Met Center who helped on the forecast.

There’s a 40% chance that the world will get so hot in the next five years that it will temporarily push past the temperature limit the Paris climate agreement is trying to prevent, meteorologists said. A new World Meteorological Organization forecast for the next several years also predicts a 90% chance that the world will set yet another record for the hottest year by the end of 2025 and that the Atlantic will continue to brew more potentially dangerous hurricanes than it used to. For this year, the meteorologists say large parts of land in the Northern Hemisphere will be 1.4 degrees (0.8 degrees Celsius) warmer than recent decades and that the U.S. Southwest’s drought will continue.