“Temperatures tell only a small part of the story. The warmth in 2017 was accompanied by extreme weather in many countries around the world. The United States of America had its most expensive year ever in terms of weather and climate disasters, whilst other countries saw their development slowed or reversed by tropical cyclones, floods and drought,” said Mr Taalas.

 

WMO will issue its full Statement on the State of the Climate in 2017 in March. This report will provide a comprehensive overview of temperature variability and trends, high-impact events, and long-term indicators of climate change such as increasing carbon dioxide concentrations, Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, sea level rise and ocean acidification. The final statement will include information submitted by a wide range of United Nations agencies on human, socio-economic and environmental impacts as part of a drive to provide a more comprehensive, United Nations-wide policy brief for decision makers on the interplay between weather, climate and water and the United Nations global development goals.

 

WMO uses datasets (based on monthly climatological data from observing sites) from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom.

 

It also uses reanalysis datasets from the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts and its Copernicus Climate Change Service, and the Japan Meteorological Agency. This method combines millions of meteorological and marine observations, including from satellites, with models to produce a complete reanalysis of the atmosphere. The combination of observations with models makes it possible to estimate temperatures at any time and in any place across the globe, even in data-sparse areas such as the polar regions.

 

 

The three conventional surface temperature data sets are NOAA’s NOAAGlobalTemp data set, Met Office Hadley Centre and Climatic Research Unit HadCRUT.4.6.0.0 data set and NASA GISS’s GISTEMP data set. They use measurements of air temperature over land and sea-water temperature measurements over oceans to estimate temperature anomalies around the globe. The reanalyses are the ERA-Interim of the European Centre for Medium Weather Forecasts and the JRA-55 of the Japan Meteorological Agency. Despite the very different approach, the estimates of global average temperatures produced by these reanalyses are in good agreement with the conventional surface temperature datasets

 

WMO now uses 1981-2010 as a baseline for computing Temperature variations at monthly, seasonal and annual time-scales. This replaces the 1961-1990 baseline used previously. The 1981-2010 period is also recommended by WMO to compute the climatological standard normal for operational climate monitoring as it is more representative of current climatic conditions. It allows a consistent reporting of information from satellite and reanalysis systems, some of which do not extend back to 1960, alongside with traditional data sets based on surface-based-observations managed by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services of the 191 WMO Member States and territories. For global average temperatures, the 1981-2010 period is approximately 0.31±0.02°C warmer than that of 1961-1990. The change in the baselines has no influence on trend analysis.

 

WMO uses the period 1880-1900 as a reference period for pre-industrial conditions allowing early instrumental observations to be used for estimating pre-industrial temperature conditions.

 

Read the relevant WMO press release here.

 

Source: UNFCCC

Neither international aviation nor international shipping were part of the climate change targets set under the Paris Agreement. As a consequence, these two specific industries were the only ones not included in any of the national climate action plans submitted by countries after the Paris agreement, often referred to as Nationally Determined Contributions.

 

Things finally started moving in 2016, when the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted its Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) to address carbon emissions from international flights. If the shipping sector does not follow suit quickly, its carbon emissions are forecasted to make up 10%-17% of global GHG emissions by 2050, posing a significant threat to the Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global warming well below 2°C.

 

From a political standpoint, holding  major emitters like the shipping sector accountable is also tremendously important to the overall success of climate action: If powerful industries are not required to do their due diligence, how can we expect poor and vulnerable countries to understand that they, too, should be taking action? And how can we expect certain transport modes to act pro-actively on climate when others are exempt from any obligations?