| Join 370+ senior policy and business leaders in London on June 17-18 for the FT Climate & Impact Summit, exploring political volatility, adaptation finance, nature, clean tech and AI’s energy demands. Use code FTS10 for 10% off your in-person or digital pass. Hello from London, where it is cooling down after a week when temperature records for May were surpassed by more than 2C, peaking at 35.1C on Tuesday. The May record heat across the UK and much of the Europe continues a trend where the past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record. The European continent continues to warm at twice the rate of the global average, in part due to the effect of the Arctic ice melt which exposes darker ground that absorbs solar radiation. This trend was highlighted in the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) annual-to-decadal report, which details predictions for the global climate over the next five years. Global temperatures are expected to surpass record-breaking highs in the next five years, the report highlighted, as the world struggles to tackle climate change. It said there was an 86 per cent chance that one year between 2026 and 2030 would surpass the last record year of 2024 as the warmest, when the average global temperature hit 1.55C above the pre-industrial level. The WMO’s predictive models also highlighted the 91 per cent chance that the global mean near-surface temperature would temporarily exceed 1.5C above the 1850-1900 average for at least one year between 2026 and 2030, but a less than 1 per cent chance this would exceed 2C. The WMO report said while there would be wetter than average conditions at high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere over the next five winters, rainfall would be reduced in the subtropics. Its modelling also suggested wetter summers in the Sahel, northern Europe, Alaska and Siberia, but dry anomalies over the Amazon. Climate change brings atmospheric changes that heighten the weather extremes — making the hot hotter, the dry drier and the wet wetter. The WMO annual report featured a line chart showing the global mean near-surface temperature anomaly compared with the 1991-2020 baseline, combined with a secondary-axis bar chart showing the probability of exceeding a rise of 1.5C. However, as a key finding of the report referred to the probability of exceeding 1.5C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, it seemed more appropriate to use that baseline for our graphic as opposed to the more recent period of 1991-2020. Adding the 1.3C to 1.9C range to the chart to highlight where the next 5 years’ average temperatures are likely to fall, along with an explanatory headline and informative annotation, help to illustrate the details of the report. Also featured by the WMO were a series of maps which showed the high probability that average temperatures and precipitation would exceed the long term average in the next five years in many parts of the world. These files were provided on request by the WMO in netCDF format (the preferred format by scientists for geographic data). Despite obtaining the data in time to make the graphics on deadline, it would have been preferable if the WMO followed the European Earth observation agency Copernicus’ lead to provide direct links to the data when a report is released under an embargo. This is best practise, allowing for greater expert review of the data and taking into account news media deadlines. The data was imported into Qgis, the FT’s geographic informations system software of choice, and styled using appropriate colour ramps for the subject matter. In the report, they used a blue to red colour ramp for temperature and then reversed it to red to blue for precipitation. Although red is intuitively interpreted to mean more heat, and blue to mean more rain, there remained the potential for confusion. So we used a different colour scale for precipitation, going from brown to blue, to avoid ambiguity. The past three years are the hottest on record, on the back of climate change with the additional effect of the El Niño weather event. Leon Hermanson, lead author of the report, said: “There is an El Niño predicted for the end of 2026, which increases the chances of the following year, 2027, being the next record-breaking year.” The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) has put an 82 per cent chance on an El Niño event developing between now and July. Even if companies in the world’s biggest economy were at all concerned about climate risk to their business, in a late Friday statement the SEC proposed in its wisdom to rescind planned rules about disclosing the risks to investors — read its reasoning why. In the world’s second-biggest economy, China has changed its maths on accounting for carbon emissions — the European Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air explained how the new sums add up. Closer to home, one of the most-read climate related stories of the week was about the new demand for air conditioning in UK houses built in a bygone era and how it can cope with now-inevitable hot summers.
Edited by Emiliya Mychasuk, FT climate editor | 
