Global average temperatures continue to rise. 2016 will be the hottest year on record, while CO2 concentration keeps growing, now above 400 ppm.
The news is not good. And looking at the data and graphs, there is cause for concern. Scientists say so — not environmentalists. After the records set in the first quarter of this year, April too closes with an anomaly of 1.1 degrees above the reference period, dangerously close to the 1.5-degree limit that the Paris Agreement sought to maintain.
The conditional is a must, given that the curves continue to point upward. According to Gavin Schmidt, Nasa climate scientist, "there is a 99 per cent chance that 2016 will be a new record year".
Andy Pitman, director of the Arc centre of excellence for climate system science at the University of New South Wales in Australia, told the Guardian that "it is clear that we have taken the wrong direction. Climate scientists have been warning us since the 1980s. And it has been obvious since the early 2000s. Why be surprised? The 1.5-degree target is just a pipe dream. I don't even know if we could achieve 1.5 degrees even if all CO2 emissions were stopped today. There is strong inertia in the system that is putting pressure on the 2-degree limit".
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Unfccc), admits: "The unfortunate circumstance we are experiencing now is the overlap of an intense El Niño that has been amplified by climate change. All these records and the implications they carry, such as the record wildfires for example and the drought in India, are warnings that we cannot afford to do anything other than accelerate the climate agenda".
Following the fires in Canada, the exceptional heatwave in India and the severe stress on Arctic ice, CO2 concentration continues to rise. This happened just a few days ago at the Cape Grim monitoring station in Tasmania. For the first time, the threshold of 400 parts per million (ppm) was exceeded in the southern hemisphere, while the previous year the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) had already reported recording the record at a global level. "Eliminating around 80 per cent of fossil fuel emissions would essentially bring the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations to a halt," said James Butler of Noaa's Global Monitoring Division. "CO2 concentrations will not begin to fall until that happens, and the decline will in any case be slow".
