Earth On Course For 'Catastrophic' Warming, UN Says

Global average surface temperatures last year tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record, a study by NASA shows, highlighting concerns that the planet faces runaway global warming.

Earth is on track for a "catastrophic" increase in temperature this century, the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Thursday as it also confirmed GISS's findings. The unabated pace of climate change is "destroying lives", UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday.

The heat was recorded even as a the world's economic slowdown caused by the COVID pandemic cut deeply into fossil fuel pollution, adding evidence that carbon dioxide deposits in the atmosphere have set the planet on a warming trajectory.

Scientists said all people need to do was look at what's happening to the environment: "We saw the heat waves, the fires... the (melting) Arctic," NASA's top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said. "We expect it to get hotter and that's exactly what happened."

Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies said continuing Earth's long-term warming rate, 2020's globally averaged temperature was 1.84 degrees Fahrenheit (1.02 degrees Celsius) warmer compared to the baseline 1951-1980 mean average.

Last year's temperature edged out 2016 by a tiny fraction - within the researchers' margin of error - making the years effectively tied for the warmest year on record.

According to researchers at the Texas A&M University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Nanjing University in China, Earth will see heating exceeding 2 Deg. C - just from the current global emissions and not factoring future emissions that continue to be rising year after year.

Meanwhile, the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change calls on nations to regulate global warming at well under 2 Deg. C of pre-industrial level, while governments will pursue more initiatives to cap the increase to 1.5 Deg. C.

The warmest three years on record were 2016, 2019 and 2020, the UN weather agency said, and the differences between them in average global temperatures were "indistinguishably small."