Marina Romanello, a climate and health researcher at University College London and head of the Lancet Countdown, said: “We have data showing how the very foundations of health are being undermined by climate change and, despite that knowledge, we’re seeing governments and companies still prioritising fossil fuels. Instead, governments including the US, UK and Australia have granted licences to drill for more. In a roadmap to net zero emissions drawn up by the International Energy Agency, there should have been no new oil and gasfields approved for development from 2021. It needs to be planned, it requires cooperation it requires a provision of finance at a scale that is currently not being provided.” The president of the Cop28 summit, Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the head of the country’s national oil company, said in an interview with the Guardian this month that phasing down fossil fuels was “inevitable and essential”.Ĭatherine Abreu, the founder of the Canadian campaign group Destination Zero, said governments must understand that “this transition away from fossil fuels is not just inevitable, it is urgent. World leaders are meeting in the United Arab Emirates in November to agree ways to stop the planet heating, adapt to more extreme weather and pay for the damage. We need to shift the conversation to what needs to happen urgently this year.” She added: “This should serve as a compelling wake-up call for all of us. Photograph: Ronda Churchill/AFP/Getty Images Joyce Kimutai, a climate scientist at the Grantham Institute, said bigger and stronger extreme weather events were causing havoc worldwide – particularly in poorer countries least responsible for emissions.Ī heat advisory sign is shown along US highway 190 during a heatwave in Death Valley national park in California. The WMO warned this did not mean the target would be missed as it referred to a 20-year average and not individual months or years. That effect, together with greenhouse gas pollution, has led the WMO to predict a two in three chance that one of the next five years will be 1.5C hotter than before the Industrial Revolution – the level to which world leaders promised to try to limit global heating by the end of the century. Scientists expect this year to be hotter than usual because El Niño, a natural pattern of wind and water that heats the planet, is returning after three years of its cooler counterpart, La Niña. And the later we stop burning fossil fuels, the more frequent they become.” The scientists said the first two would have been “virtually impossible” if people had not caused the changes to the climate.įriederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and lead author of the study, said: “We have to live with these – and make it possible for people to live with these – extreme conditions in summers. The study, which used established methods but had not yet been peer-reviewed, found humanity made the heatwaves in southern Europe, North America and China 2.5C, 2C and 1C hotter respectively. Greenhouse gas pollution has driven up the temperatures of deadly heatwaves on three continents this month, according to a rapid analysis from the World Weather Attribution network published on Tuesday. We don’t see anything analogous in the historical record for the month of July.” I personally find the magnitude of this record a bit stunning. He said: “Barring a major asteroid impact today, it is virtually certain that July 2023 will be the warmest month on record by a large margin. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the US nonprofit Berkeley Earth, used tools from Japanese and European meteorologists to estimate the record would be broken by closer to 0.3C. Haustein took global temperature estimates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US and found July 2023 was likely to beat the previous record from 2019 by 0.2C. A man stands ready to fight flames as they engulf a hillside on 27 July in Apollana, on the island of Rhodes, Greece.

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