‘Hanging by a Thread’: U.N. Chief Warns of Missing a Key Climate Target

With the planet in the grips of its highest temperatures in more than 100,000 years, scientists with the United Nations weather agency have crunched the numbers and come to a stark conclusion: More record-hot years are all but inevitable.

In the next five years, there’s a nearly 90 percent chance Earth will set yet another record for its warmest year, surpassing the scorching highs experienced in 2023, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report Wednesday.

The chances are almost as great that, in at least one of these five calendar years, the average global temperature will be 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than it was at the dawn of the industrial age. That’s the level of warming that countries set out to avoid under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

“The target of limiting long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is hanging by a thread,” the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said in a speech on Wednesday at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He called for urgent action in a number of areas, including slashing carbon dioxide emissions and adopting renewable energy, helping poor countries finance their climate plans, and clamping down on the fossil fuel industry.

On the last subject, Mr. Guterres reiterated past exhortations to end taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas. But he also turned his attention to a new target: He urged governments to ban advertising by fossil-fuel companies, comparing oil and coal producers to the tobacco industry, which faces advertising restrictions worldwide. And he urged the news media and tech companies to stop displaying their ads.