The United Nations warned on Wednesday that all four key climate change indicators set new record highs in 2021. Thus, warning that the global energy system was leading humanity towards disaster.
Greenhouse gas concentrations, sea-level rise, ocean heat, and ocean acidification—all set new highs in 2021.
The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization released the report. According to the report the catastrophic climate change has resulted in economic losses worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
The annual overview is “a dismal litany of humanity’s failure to tackle climate disruption”, UN chief Antonio Guterres said.
“The global energy system is broken and bringing us ever closer to climate catastrophe.”
“It wreaked a heavy toll on human lives and well-being and triggered shocks for food and water security and displacement that have accentuated in 2022,” the WMO said in its report State of the Global Climate in 2021.
“This is yet another clear sign that human activities are causing planetary-scale changes on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere, with harmful and long-lasting ramifications for sustainable development and ecosystems,” says the report.
Matter of time
According to the UN agency, levels of climate-warming carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere exceeded previous records in 2021.
The research also verified that the previous seven years were the top seven hottest years on record.
The global annual mean temperature difference is considered from pre-industrial conditions (1850-1900) for six global temperature data sets (1850-2021).
The report confirmed that, among the seven warmest years on record, 2021 was “only” due to a La Nina event (ocean phenomenon in the Pacifics) between the beginning and close of the year.
“This had a temporary cooling effect but did not reverse the overall trend of rising temperatures. The average global temperature in 2021 was about 1. (https://www.saasgenius.com) 11 (plus/minus 0.13) degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.
It is just a matter of time before we see another warmest year on record,” said WMO Secretary-General Professor Petteri Taalas.