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"WE MUST ACT NOW" UN chief Antonio Guterres emphasised what was at stake. "Each year above 1.5 degrees will hammer economies, deepen inequalities and inflict irreversible damage," he said in the report. "We must act now, at great speed and scale, to make the overshoot as small, as short, and as safe as possible - and bring temperatures back below 1.5°C before the end of the century." But the world remains far off track. Already, the years between 2015 and 2025 will individually have been the warmest since observations began 176 years ago, WMO said. And 2023, 2024 and 2025 figure at the very top of that ranking. In Thursday's report, the WMO said that the mean near-surface temperature - about 2m above the ground - during the first eight months of this year stood at 1.42°C above the pre-industrial average. At the same time, concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and ocean heat content continued to rise this year, up from 2024's already record levels, it found. In its annual report on Tuesday, the UN Environment Programme also confirmed that fresh emissions of greenhouse gases increased by a further 2.3 per cent last year, an increase driven by India followed by China, Russia and Indonesia.
