U.N. Weather Agency Issues ‘Red Alert’ over Climate Crisis

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Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

The U.N. weather agency warned Tuesday the climate crisis is “the defining challenge” of our age, urging immediate action to curb global warming.

In its State of the Global Climate report, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said the year 2023 “broke every single climate indicator” and was “by far the warmest year on record.”

“Never have we been so close” to the 1.5° C lower limit of the Paris Agreement on climate change, the report laments, since the global average temperature in 2023 was 1.45° C above the pre-industrial average.

The report is meant to “raise awareness of the vital need to scale up the urgency and ambition of climate action,” according to WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo.

Curiously, for the global mean temperature time series, the WMO used “a reference period of 1850–1900” because this is the baseline used by the IPCC as “a reference period for pre-industrial conditions” and is “relevant for understanding progress in the context of the Paris Agreement.”

This is curious because according to NASA, serious global temperature tracking only began in 1880, by NASA’s own Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center, and the U.K. Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre.

Although sporadic attempts to measure temperature were made, “there are too few data before 1880 for scientists to estimate average temperatures for the entire planet,” NASA asserts.

Moreover, because proxy records from things like tree rings, pollen counts, and ice cores differ fundamentally from direct measurements, “scientists typically do not include them on the same charts as the instrumental record,’” NASA adds.

This would suggest that for the first 30 years (60 percent) of the WMO reference period, scientists have no reliable data from which to estimate average global temperatures.

Undeterred, the report also warns that globally averaged concentrations for carbon dioxide (CO2) have hit 417.9 parts per million (ppm), which would represent 150 percent of pre-industrial (1750) levels.

Yet as Greenpeace founder Dr. Patrick Moore has pointed out, historically speaking it is “glaringly obvious that temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least as often as they are in any semblance of correlation.”

Moore notes that at the end of the Jurassic period “temperature fell dramatically while CO2 spiked” and during the Eocene Thermal Maximum, “temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years.”

“This evidence alone is sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and temperature,” he said.

Moreover, as prominent astrophysicist Willie Soon has observed, the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere remained “relatively constant” over a recent fifteen-year period despite a “dramatic increase in CO2 concentrations.”

“This makes it hard to argue that global temperature changes are largely driven by changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations,” he asserted.

File/Activists gather after marching on day nine of the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference at Expo City Dubai on December 09, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. ( Sean Gallup/Getty)

Moore has also underscored that CO2 “is the currency of life and the most important building block for all life on Earth” since all life is carbon-based, including our own.

“It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today,” Moore stated. “Even at today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition.”

“CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today,” he said.

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