Key climate change indicators break records in 2021: UN report

Geneva:  Four key climate change indicators, including greenhouse gas concentrations, sea-level rise, ocean heat, and ocean acidification, set new records in 2021, a report from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.
According to the WMO State of the Global Climate in 2021 report on Wednesday, the past seven years have been the warmest seven years on record, with 2021 being “only” one of the seven warmest because of a La Nina event at the start and end of the year, which had a temporary cooling effect but did not reverse the overall trend of rising temperatures.
The average global temperature in 2021 was about 1.11 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level, the report added.
That’s based on the 2015 Paris Agreement in which countries set long-term goals to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase in this century to two degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius, Xinhua news agency reported.
The WMO report said greenhouse gas concentrations reached a new global high in 2020 and continued to increase in 2021 and early 2022, as ocean heat was a record high and ocean acidification intensified, which threatens organisms and ecosystem services, and hence food security, tourism, and coastal protection.
The global mean sea level also reached a new record high in 2021, at a rate of more than double that between 1993 and 2002, mainly due to the accelerated loss of ice mass from the ice sheets.