Earth estimated to get 40% hotter than Paris climate goal soon

There's a 40 percent chance that the world will get so hot in the next five years that it will temporarily push past the temperature limit the Paris climate agreement is trying to prevent, meteorologists have said.

A new World Meteorological Organization forecast for the next several years also predicts a 90 percent chance that the world will set yet another record for the hottest year by the end of 2025 and that the Atlantic will continue to brew more potentially dangerous hurricanes than it used to.

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2015 Paris climate goals

For this year, the meteorologists say large parts of land in the Northern Hemisphere will be 0.8 degrees Celsius warmer than recent decades and that the US Southwest's drought will continue.

The 2015 Paris climate accord set a goal of keeping global heating to a few tenths of a degree warmer from now. The report said there is a 40 percent chance that at least one of the next five years will be 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times — the more stringent of two Paris goals. 

The world is already 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial times.

Last year, the same group forecasted a 20 percent chance of it happening.

The doubling of the odds is due to improvements in technology that show it has "actually warmed more than we thought already," especially over the lightly-monitored polar regions, said Leon Hermanson, a climate scientist at the United Kingdom's Met Center who helped on the forecast.

"It's a warning that we need to take strong action," Hermanson said.

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'Paris warming threshold will be exceeded'

Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn't part of the report, said he is "almost certain" the world will exceed that Paris warming threshold at least once in the next few years. 

But he said one or two years above 1.5 degrees Celsius isn't as worrisome as when the overall trend of temperatures stays above that level.

Mann said that won't happen probably for decades and could still be prevented.

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