Last year tied with 2015 as the fifth-warmest year since record-keeping began in 1880, NASA said. That was despite the presence of the La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, which generally lowers global temperatures slightly.

The world’s average global temperature is now 1.1 C to 1.2 C higher than in pre-industrial times.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Thursday it had ranked 2022 as the sixth warmest since 1880. European Union scientists this week said 2022 was the fifth warmest year in their records.

Climate assessments produce slightly different rankings depending on the data sources used and the way records account for minor data alterations over time, for example, a weather station being moved to a new location.

NASA said temperatures were increasing by more than 0.2 C per decade, putting the world on track to blow past the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global warming to 1.5 C to avoid its most devastating consequences.

“At the rate that we’re going, it’s not going to take more than two decades to get us to that. And the only way that we’re not going to do that is if we stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Schmidt said he expected 2023 to be slightly warmer than 2022, due to a weaker La Nina cooling phenomenon.

“The global mean temperature will be even higher in 10 years from now,” said ETH Zurich climate scientist Sonia Seneviratne, adding that unless countries stopped burning CO2-emitting fossil fuels temperatures would continue to climb.

Weather extremes

The changing climate fuelled weather extremes across the planet in 2022. Europe suffered its hottest summer on record, while in Pakistan floods killed 1,700 people and wrecked infrastructure, drought ravaged crops in Uganda and wildfires ripped through Mediterranean countries.

Despite most of the world’s major emitters pledging to eventually slash their net emissions to zero, global CO2 emissions continue to rise.

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere last year reached levels not experienced on earth for three million years, Schmidt said.

At this year’s COP28 climate conference, countries will formally assess their progress towards the Paris Agreement’s 1.5 C goal — and the far faster emissions cuts needed to meet it.

COP28 host the United Arab Emirates on Thursday appointed the head of its state-owned oil company as president of the conference, sparking concerns among campaigners and scientists about the fossil fuel industry’s influence in the talks.

— Kate Abnett is Reuters’ European climate and energy correspondent in Brussels.

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The congressionally mandated report, written with the help of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies and departments, outlined the projected impact of global warming on every corner of U.S. society in a dire warning that is at odds with the Trump administration’s pro-fossil-fuels agenda.

“With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current gross domestic product (GDP) of many U.S. states,” the report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II, said.

Global warming would disproportionately hurt the poor, broadly undermine human health, damage infrastructure, limit the availability of water, alter coastlines, and boost costs in industries from farming, to fisheries and energy production, the report said.

But it added that projections of further damage could change if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply curbed, even though many of the impacts of climate change — including more frequent and more powerful storms, droughts and flooding — are already under way. “Future risks from climate change depend primarily on decisions made today,” it said.

The report supplements a study issued last year that concluded humans are the main driver of global warming and warned of catastrophic effects to the planet.

The studies clash with policy under President Donald Trump, who has been rolling back Obama-era environmental and climate protections to maximize production of domestic fossil fuels, including crude oil, already the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia.

White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the new report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario, which contradicts long-established trends by assuming that… there would be limited technology and innovation, and a rapidly expanding population.”

The government’s next update of the National Climate Assessment, she said, “gives us the opportunity to provide for a more transparent and data-driven process that includes fuller information on the range of potential scenarios and outcomes.”

Trump last year announced his intention to withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Deal agreed by nearly 200 nations to combat climate change, arguing the accord would hurt the U.S. economy and provide little tangible environmental benefit. Trump and several members of his cabinet have also repeatedly cast doubt on the science of climate change, arguing that the causes and impacts are not yet settled.

Environmental groups said the report reinforced their calls for the United States to take action on climate change.

“While President Trump continues to ignore the threat of climate change, his own administration is sounding the alarm,” said Abigail Dillen, president of environmental group Earthjustice.

“This report underscores what we are already seeing firsthand: climate change is real, it’s happening here, and it’s happening now.”

Previous research, including from U.S. government scientists, has also concluded that climate change could have severe economic consequences, including damage to infrastructure, water supplies and agriculture.

Severe weather and other impacts also increase the risk of disease transmission, decrease air quality, and can increase mental health problems, among other effects.

Thirteen government departments and agencies, from USDA to NASA, were part of the committee that compiled the new report.

The entire report can be viewed online.

— Writing for Reuters by Richard Valdmanis.

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Some freak weather events would have happened naturally but the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said greenhouse gas emissions had raised the risks of extreme events, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more.

“We just had the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Among the worst extremes, a 2011-12 drought and famine in the Horn of Africa killed more than 250,000 people and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines killed 7,800 in 2013, the WMO said.

Superstorm Sandy caused $67 billion of damage in 2012, mostly in the United States, it said in a report issued to a meeting of almost 200 nations in Morocco tasked with implementing a 2015 global agreement to combat climate change.

The last five-year period beat 2006-10 as the warmest such period since records began in the 19th century.

The heat was accompanied by a gradual rise in sea levels spurred by melting glaciers and ice sheets. The changes “confirmed the long-term warming trend caused by greenhouse gases,” the WMO said of the report.

And the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, reached 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in records in 2015, it said.

Last year was the first in which temperatures were one degrees Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, partly because of an El Nino weather event that warmed the Pacific.

The 2015 Paris Agreement set an overriding target of limiting warming to “well below” 2 degrees C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, ideally just 1.5 (2.7F).

But pledges so far to curb greenhouse gas emissions are too weak and put the globe on target for about 3C (5.4F), U.N. data show. The Marrakesh meeting is trying to work out ways to step up actions and write rules for the Paris Agreement.

Getting on track “means a global transformation” of the world economy to cleaner energies in sectors from energy to transport, Moroccan Environment Minister Hakima El Haite told Reuters.

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Examining long-term trends for ice floating on the ocean since the 1950s, scientists in Germany and the United States projected the ocean around the North Pole would be ice-free in summers by the mid-2040s at current levels of emissions.

In the historical records, they found that every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere meant on average the loss of three square metres of ice in September, when the ice reaches a minimum extent before expanding in winter.

That made it possible to “grasp the contribution of personal carbon dioxide emissions to the loss of Arctic sea ice,” scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote in the journal Science.

Each passenger taking a return flight from New York to Europe, or driving a gasoline car 4,000 kms, would emit about a tonne of carbon dioxide, they estimated.

A long-term retreat of Arctic sea ice is already causing profound changes, disrupting the lives of indigenous peoples while opening the region to more oil and gas exploration and shipping.

Scientists usually deal in more abstract terms such as billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases. “Here it’s more personal,” lead author Dirk Notz of the Max Planck Institute told Reuters.

Some other scientists said the study was simplistic.

“This sounds like a rather crude equation,” Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, told Reuters.

He said ice could disappear from the Arctic Ocean as early as 2017 or 2018 because of other factors triggered by man-made climate change, such as shifts in winds and rising sea temperatures.

In September 2016, sea ice shrank to an annual minimum extent of 4.14 million square kilometres (1.60 million square miles), matching 2007 as the second smallest in the satellite record behind 2012.

The study said goals set under the 2015 Paris Agreement for curbing emissions were insufficient to avert the loss of ice.

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Greenhouse gas emissions from industry left their first traces in the temperatures of tropical oceans and the Arctic around 1830, researchers wrote in a recent journal article, challenging widespread views that man-made climate change began only in the 20th century.

The Industrial Revolution began around 1750 in Britain, with a surge in the use of coal to power factories, ships and railways, and gradually spread around the world.

Greenhouse gases at the time were only a fraction of those now blamed for trapping excessive levels of the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, stoking more droughts, floods, heat waves and rising sea levels.

“Our findings show that the climate can respond very quickly to changes in greenhouse gases,” lead author Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University, told Reuters of the findings published in the journal Nature.

The scientists detected a rise in temperatures in the 19th century by studying the growth of old trees, corals, the makeup of lake sediments and air trapped in ice cores in Antarctica.

Their computer models showed that natural factors — such as changes in the sun’s energy output or the Earth’s orbit — could not fully explain the warming trend.

The rising heat only made sense when factoring in an early dose of man-made greenhouse gases, they wrote.

Previously, many scientists have reckoned a small rise in 19th century temperatures was a rebound after a sun-dimming volcanic eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.

“This is further evidence that the climate has already changed significantly since the pre-industrial period,” said Ed Hawkins, a climate scientists at Reading University who was not involved in the study.

Last year, almost 200 nations agreed at a Paris summit to shift from fossil fuels and set a goal of limiting rises in average surface temperatures to “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial times, ideally below 1.5 C.

The Paris deal does not define pre-industrial. Temperatures this year, likely to set new records, are just over 1 C above levels in the 1880s, a widely used baseline in climate science.

Abram said using a baseline of 1800 would make the Paris Agreement harder to achieve by adding perhaps 0.2 C.

“We are frighteningly close already to 1.5,” she said.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters correspondent covering environmental and climate change-related issues from Oslo.

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July was the hottest single month since records began in the 19th century, driven by greenhouse gases and an El Nino event warming the Pacific. And NASA this week cited a 99 per cent chance that 2016 will be the warmest year, ahead of 2015 and 2014.

In a welcome break, a new annual record is unlikely in 2017 since the effect of El Nino — a phenomenon that warms the eastern Pacific and can disrupt weather patterns worldwide every two to seven years — is fading.

“Next year is probably going to be cooler than 2016,” said Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. He added there was no sign of a strong La Nina, El Nino’s opposite that can cool the planet.

In 1998, a powerful El Nino led to a record year of heat and it took until 2005 to surpass the warmth. That hiatus led some people who doubt mainstream findings that climate change has a human cause to conclude that global warming had stopped.

“If 2017 is cooler, there will probably be some climate skeptics surfing on this information,” said Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

“The long-term trend is towards warming but there is natural variability so there are ups and downs. The scientific community will have again to explain what is happening,” he told Reuters.

The spike in temperatures in 1998 may also have contributed for several years to reduced government attention to climate change, which has been linked to more heat waves, floods, downpours and rising sea levels.

“One thing that the scientific community needs to be careful about is that they are not gearing up for a new ‘hiatus’ event,” said Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Energy Research in Oslo.

At a Paris summit last December, governments agreed the most comprehensive plan yet to shift away from fossil fuels, setting a goal of limiting the rise in temperatures to “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial times, ideally 1.5 C.

Scientists are meeting in Geneva this week to sketch out themes for a report about the 1.5 C goal that was requested by world leaders at the summit for delivery in 2018.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters correspondent covering environmental and climate change-related issues from Oslo.

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The slowdown in the rate of rising temperatures, from faster gains in the 1980s and 1990s, has puzzled scientists because heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions from factories, power plants and cars have hit record highs.

Understanding the slowdown is vital to project future warming and to agree curbs on emissions, linked by scientists to heatwaves, floods and rising seas. Almost 200 nations are due to agree a U.N. deal to slow climate change in Paris in December.

Examining temperatures of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans back to 1850, which have natural swings in winds and currents that can last decades, the scientists said a cooler phase in the Pacific in recent years helped explain the warming hiatus.

Combined trends from the two oceans were seen to “produce a slowdown or ‘false pause’ in warming in the past decade,” the three scientists wrote in the journal Science.

“It appears to be the Pacific that is the main driver” of the two oceans in masking warming, Michael Mann, a co-author and professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, told Reuters. “The Atlantic is a minor player right now.”

The study said the warming pause was unlikely to last. “Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse” and add to man-made warming “in the coming decades”, it said.

Even though the pace of rising temperatures has slowed, last year was the warmest since records began in the 19th century, according to the U.N. World Meteorological Organization.

In 2013, the U.N. panel of climate scientists said the pause in warming was due to factors including natural swings such as shifts in ocean heat, sun-dimming volcanic eruptions and a decline in solar output in an 11-year cycle.

“The slowdown in warming is probably a combination of several different factors,” Mann said.

The U.N. panel says it is at least 95 per cent probable that most warming since 1950 is man-made. But opinion polls show many voters suspect natural variations are to blame, making it hard to agree on solutions.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters environment correspondent based in Oslo.

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