“Pushing through the market square/ So many mothers sighing (sighing)/ News had just come over/ We had five years left to cry in (cry in)” [Bowie, ‘Five Years’]

Such is the opening to one of the greatest albums of all time, David Bowie’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. Amazing, really, that I’d be quoting them in the context of a very real, and from an emerging risk perspective increasingly threatening, reality.

What I’m referring to here is the stark warning given by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) this week that global temperatures are now likely to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F) of warming within the next five years.

Of course, the WMO can’t be certain, but from a gambling point of view the odds are stacked: according to the organisation, there is a 66% likelihood that the annual average near-surface global temperature between 2023 and 2027 will be more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for at least one year.

This represents quite an acceleration, given that recent worst estimates gave us a more benign timeframe.  For example a recent study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found new evidence that our planet will cross the global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius within a more modest 10 to 15 years.

The so-called “time to threshold” estimate, only released in January, results from an analysis that employs artificial intelligence to predict climate change using recent temperature observations from around the world.

Now it seems that even a 10-15 year window looks generous…

Marcus Alcock

Editor, Emerging Risks