2024 was the warmer year ever measured. Each course of the last decade is within ten years with more temperature. The heat trapped on the planet continues to melt the glaciers, the polar ice and expand the oceans so that the sea level is at the maximum since it can be measured by satellite, according to the latest report of the climate state of the World Meteorological Organization (OMM).
The level rise rate has more than folded compared to that of 1993. Each year more than three millimeters rises, so since the beginning of the twentieth century it has grown more than 20 centimeters. It seems little, but it is the average level of all oceans. In places like the Tuvalu Islands – with an average altitude of 4.5 meters – he has already denounced that they are with water to the knees. Kiribati has come to consider buying land in Fiyi to save its population from marine flood.
The rise in sea level was the first Chivato For the mass public about the threat of global warming caused by the concentration of CO2. THE COVER OF THE MAGAZINE People October 1979 showed a photo of scientist Gordon Mac Donald marking on the staircases of the Capitol How far the sea could climb if polar caps melt: “CO2 could change the weather and flood the earth so far.” On August 22, 1981, he jumped to the cover of the New York Times: “A study finds a tendency to warming that could raise sea level.”
A higher sea level not only floods distant Pacific archipelagos. It entails the increase in coastal erosion, the recoil accused of beaches or the destruction of dunes. This leaves the coast more unprotected to the most violent coastal storms and favors floods. It is a well -known reality in Spain.
What is now measuring the OMM is how the accumulation of greenhouse gases injected by human activities in the atmosphere trap the heat that should escape the outer space. If in 2024 the average global temperature of the planet was about 1.55ºC higher than in pre -industrial times, it remains the sea that is the one to be swallow Most of that excess radiation. Thus, the OMM has certified that the amount of heat contained in the oceans also beat its record in 2024. “In the last eight years the previous one has been exceeded.”
And when heating, sea water expands. The Copernicus service of the European Union has calculated that every year the volume of the oceans grows as much as “480 million Olympic pools “ full of water (each one contains about 2,500 m3). And that increase pushed sea level, which arrives higher.
In addition, the warmest sea not only degrades ecosystems or reduces the sea capacity of absorbing CO2 but also exacerbates tropical and subtropical storms, “says the organization. Episodes such as the Dana de Valencia – torrential lluvias of great violence – are already increasingly recurring in Spain (especially in Levante): its intensity has multiplied by four.
Next to these prolonged trends, extreme weather events – the acute episodes – made it in 2024 to register “the greatest number of new displaced in a year since 2008”. The worldwide meterological organization database He recorded 137 heat waves last year, 114 torrential rain, 103 floods, 47 hurricane storms and 44 episodes of drought.
“We are very close to the threshold of 1.5 degrees, which already represents a significant increase and entails serious consequences such as the increase of extreme climatic phenomena, the thaw and the irreversible rise of the sea level. This report serves, once again, as an urgent call to the action,” says Anna Cabré, scientific climate associated with the University of Pennsylvania (United States).
Objective of the Paris Agreement
The 1.5ºC threshold marks the objective of the Paris Agreement against climate change. Overcoming it in a timely manner, although it indicates that it is not on the right track, it does not imply having failed because “there is a considerable variability from year to year at the global temperature of the planet,” explains the OMM.
The objective of the agreement is that the extra warming of the earth does not exceed those levels at the end of the century. It is a long -term objective and scientists understand that to take for granted it would have to exceed for a period of about 20 years, a decade after it is found that the global temperature is beyond the famous 1.5ºC of the preindustrial era.
However, the superior meteorologist of the State and a member of the Spanish Meteorological Association, Ernesto Rodríguez Camino is not so optimistic: “All indicators point out the increasingly difficult compliance with the commitments acquired in the Paris Agreement.”
#Global #warming #elevates #sea #highest #level #records
