22/11/2024
Below is a message from our Eco Team 🌍
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The weather in 2024
As I write this there is snow on the ground! At the beginning of September the Meteorological Office announced that the UK had had its coolest summer since 2015. But this does not provide much respite in the challenges posed by climate change. On 11 November the World Meteorological Organization announced that, globally, 2024 is on track to be the hottest year on record and may be the first year to show an average surface air temperature of more than 1.5o C above the pre-industrial level. A limit in global temperature rise to 1.5o C is an internationally agreed target, following the Paris Agreement of 2015. There is a cyclical pattern in the annual temperature figures due to natural climate processes, but the trend remains upwards and more action will be necessary to reverse the pattern and achieve a restriction to 1.5o C by 2050 or 2100.
Some may question whether this target is sufficiently rigorous given the already increasing severity of “extreme weather” events. In a recent press release United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said “Climate catastrophe is hammering health, widening inequalities, harming sustainable development, and rocking the foundations of peace. The vulnerable are hardest hit.” NASA has predicted that some regions of the earth will become uninhabitable by humans, in a world in which the human population is 8.1 billion and still increasing. The U.N.-related International Organization for Migration has recently said [Objectives, page 4 of the .pdf] “Conflict, climate change, environmental degradation and uneven development are increasingly driving displacement and irregular migration. In 2024, nearly 300 million people around the world will need humanitarian assistance and protection due to conflicts, climate emergencies and other drivers”.
In 2023 a report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said “As more regions around the world face extreme weather, it’s worth taking stock of the 1.5-degree bar, where the planet stands in relation to this threshold, and what can be done at the global, regional, and personal level, to “keep 1.5 alive”… Our everyday choices affect the amount of emissions that are added to the atmosphere.”