‘Off the Charts’: UN Report Highlights Rapid Climate Breakdown

Sea level rises double, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a record, World Meteorological Organization warns.

Record levels of greenhouse gases have caused “planetary scale changes on land, in the ocean and in the atmosphere”, a UN agency says in a report that shows the past eight years were the hottest ever recorded on Earth.

Global sea levels are rising at more than double the pace they did in the first decade of measurements from 1993 to 2002 and touched a new record high last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Friday in its State of Global Climate 2022 report.

Extreme glacier melt and record ocean heat levels, which cause water to expand, contributed to an average rise in sea levels of 4.62mm a year from 2013 to 2022, the organisation said in a report detailing the havoc wrought by climate change.

“Melting of glaciers and sea level rise – which again reached record levels in 2022 – will continue to up to thousands of years,” the report said. “Antarctic sea ice fell to its lowest extent on record and the melting of some European glaciers was, literally, off the charts.”