MARRAKESH, MOROCCO (Reuters) — The past five years were the hottest on record with mounting evidence that heat waves, floods and rising sea levels are increasing because of man-made climate change, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday (November 8).
A report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed 2015 was the first year in which temperatures were one degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, partly because of an El Niño weather event that warmed the Pacific.
Deputy Secretary General of the WMO Elena Manaenkova told journalists at a news conference at the U.N.’s Marrakesh Climate Change Conference that 2011-2015 “was the warmest five year period on record”.
Members of the WMO also warned greenhouse gas emissions had raised the risks of extreme events, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more.
“That means, a heat wave, for example, which used to occur in a 50-years cycle, it can now occur in a five-years cycle,” said Omar Baddour of the WMO.
The WMO report examined 79 extreme weather events from 2011 – 2015, including the 2011-12 drought and famine in the Horn of Africa that killed more than 250,000 people, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines that killed 7,800 in 2013, and “superstorm” Sandy that caused $67 billion of damage in 2012, mostly in the United States.
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.
And the global average amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million in 2015.
The Marrakesh conference brings together officials from almost 200 nations from November 7 – 18 to work on ways to implement pledges made in Paris to adopt cleaner energies such as wind and solar power.