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The planet is on course to blow past the temperature limit that world governments set as the boundary between manageable and dangerous warming — not once, but repeatedly across the next five years — with a 91 percent probability that at least one of those years will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to new projections released by the World Meteorological Organization.
The odds of shattering 2024’s record as Earth’s hottest year stand at 86 percent.
The WMO report, produced jointly with the United Kingdom’s Meteorological Office and drawn from roughly 200 simulation runs across 13 climate models, projects every year between now and 2030 will register between 1.3 and 1.9 degrees of warming above the late 19th-century baseline. The five-year average as a whole carries a 75 percent probability of exceeding 1.5 degrees — the threshold enshrined in the 2015 Paris Agreement as the ceiling for safe warming, calculated over a 20-year average.
That is not a technicality.
A subsequent U.N. scientific assessment laid out what crossing that mark actually produces: higher mortality, expanded danger zones for human populations, and accelerated species loss. Coral reefs and glaciers, the report noted, cannot absorb the strain even at levels only marginally above the threshold. Climate scientist Melissa Seabrook, a co-author of the new report from the UK Meteorological Office, pushed back on any suggestion that the 1.5 figure functions as a clean dividing line. Every tenth of a degree, she said, brings more severe consequences — a continuum of harm rather than a cliff.
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She pointed to the unprecedented heat striking Europe this week as illustration.
The principal engine behind the near-term surge is El Niño — the periodic natural warming of the central Pacific that redistributes heat worldwide and spikes global temperatures.
Nearly all short-range forecasts now anticipate a strong El Niño forming soon, with the WMO projecting it could persist through 2028. Seabrook identified 2027 as the most likely year to break the 2024 heat record.
If the five-year average does clear 1.5 degrees, it would mean Earth has warmed by a quarter of a degree in a single decade — a pace roughly 25 percent faster than the previous warming rate of two-tenths of a degree per decade. Scientists are actively debating whether that represents a genuine acceleration of climate change. Seabrook described that debate as quite scary, and said these projections, if they bear out, would strengthen the case of those who believe the pace of warming has shifted.
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The report’s regional findings are severe, and none more so than the Arctic.
Warming in the far north is running at three and a half times the global average, driven by a feedback loop that compounds itself season by season. Ice and snow that once reflected solar radiation back into space are gone. Darker ocean and land surface absorbs that energy instead. Arctic winters from 2020 to 2025 already averaged 1.2 degrees warmer than the 1991-to-2020 baseline. The WMO projects the next five winters will average 2.8 degrees warmer than that recent normal — more than doubling the anomaly in a single five-year window. Summer sea ice is forecast to continue its retreat.
The Amazon tells a different but equally alarming story. The basin faces hotter, drier conditions that the WMO says will raise wildfire risk and threaten water supplies for the millions of people who depend on the river system. The stakes extend well beyond the region. The Amazon currently functions as a vast carbon sink, pulling heat-trapping carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Under the projected conditions, it risks flipping — becoming a net source of emissions rather than a check on them, accelerating the very warming that is destroying it.
In Africa’s Sahel, the pattern runs the opposite direction. The chronically dry region is projected to receive above-normal rainfall, raising flood risk in communities already struggling with infrastructure gaps and limited emergency capacity.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell used the report’s release to deliver a blunt assessment of where global efforts stand. Heating, he said, is still outpacing attempts to contain it, and the economic and human costs are already being paid — in heatwaves burning through Europe and India, in storms, in floods, in wildfires, in disrupted food systems. Every nation, Stiell said, is already settling a bill it did not choose to run up.
The mathematics of what the WMO is projecting deserve a moment of stillness. The Paris Agreement set 1.5 degrees as an aspiration worth fighting to preserve. The new report says there is now a 9 percent chance the world manages to stay below it for even a single year between now and 2030. The question is no longer whether the threshold will be crossed. It is how many times, and how fast.
