Global heat records were "broken" last year, the UN confirmed, and 2023 ended the warmest decade on record as heat ravaged the oceans and glaciers lost a record amount of ice, AFP reported.
The UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has released its annual State of the Climate report, confirming preliminary data that 2023 was the hottest year on record.
And it came at the end of "the warmest 10-year period on record," the WMO report said.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said the report showed a "planet on the brink".
"Earth is sending a distress call," he said, pointing out that "fossil fuel pollution is wreaking climate havoc" and warning that "change is accelerating."
The WCO said the average near-Earth land surface temperature was 1.45°C higher than pre-industrial levels last year - dangerously close to the critical 1.5°C threshold that countries have agreed not to transition to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreements.
"We have never been so close to the lower limit of 1.5°C set out in the Paris Agreement," WMO chief Andrea Celeste Saulo warned in a statement.
According to her, the report should be seen as a "red alert for the world".
Reviewing the data, the organization found that "records have once again been broken, and in some cases broken", warning that the figures "give ominous new meaning to the phrase 'off the charts'".
Saulo emphasized that climate change is about much more than temperatures.
"What we have witnessed in 2023, especially with unprecedented ocean warming, retreating glaciers and loss of Antarctic sea ice, is of particular concern."
One particularly alarming finding is that sea heat covered nearly a third of the world's oceans on an average day last year.
And by the end of 2023, more than 90% of the ocean will have experienced heatwave conditions at some point in the year, the WMO said.
More frequent and intense marine heat waves will have "profound negative consequences for marine ecosystems and coral reefs," she warned.
At the same time, she warned that key glaciers around the world had suffered the biggest ice loss since records began in the 1950s, "caused by extreme melting in both western North America and Europe".
In Switzerland, where the WCO is based, alpine glaciers, for example, have lost 10% of their remaining volume in the past two years alone, the report said.
Antarctic sea ice extent is also "the lowest on record", the WCO said.
She pointed out, the maximum ice extent at the end of the southern winter was about one million square kilometres less than the previous record year - as much as France and Germany combined.
Continued ocean warming, combined with rapid melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also caused sea levels last year to reach their highest point since satellite records began in 1993, the WMO said.
The agency highlighted that the average global sea-level rise over the last decade (2014-2023) was more than twice the rate in the first decade of satellite records.
Dramatic climate change is taking a heavy toll on people around the world, fueling extreme weather events, floods and droughts that displace people and increase biodiversity loss and food insecurity.
"The climate crisis is the defining challenge facing humanity and is closely intertwined with the inequality crisis," Saulo said.
The number of people considered to be acutely food insecure around the world has more than doubled, from 149 million people before the COVID-19 pandemic to 333 million people at the end of 2023, the WCO said.
The UN Climate and Meteorological Agency did point out one "ray of hope": the growing production of energy from renewable sources.
Last year, the capacity to generate energy from renewable sources - mainly from solar, wind and hydropower - increased by almost 50% compared to 2022, she pointed out.
Guterres also stressed that the findings have a positive side.
He insisted the world still had a chance to keep the planet's long-term temperature rise below the 1.5°C threshold and "avoid the worst climate chaos".
"We know how to do it," he said. /BGNES
