May Marked Another Record-Breaking Year for Heat
The findings prompted the Secretary-General of the United Nations to call for a global advertising ban on the fossil fuel industry.
After a new report from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service found that May 2024 was the hottest May ever, United Nations secretary-general António Guterres called for a global ban on fossil fuel advertising.
“I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies,” Guterres said in his speech in New York’s American Museum of Natural History. “And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”
“We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. The battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s.
According to the Copernicus report, May 2024 was the warmest May on record, also marking 12 straight months (from June 2023 to May 2024) of the hottest months ever.
“For the past year, every turn of the calendar has turned up the heat,” Guterres said.
See Also: Trees Less Effective at Sequestering Carbon in a Hotter, Drier World“Climate change is the mother of all stealth taxes paid by everyday people and vulnerable countries and communities,” he added. “ Meanwhile, the godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies.”
Guterres reiterated his proposal for a global tax on fossil fuel companies’ ‘windfall’ profits, also urging the world’s financial institutions to stop “bankrolling fossil fuel destruction and start investing in a global renewables revolution.”
Fossil fuel groups responded to the U.N. chief’s claims, saying that addressing climate change is an important aspect of their energy production.
“Our industry is focused on continuing to produce affordable, reliable energy while tackling the climate challenge, and any allegations to the contrary are false,” said Megan Bloomgren, senior vice president of communications at the American Petroleum Institute.
While the rise in global temperatures is mainly attributed to human emissions of planet-warming gasses, the El Niño climatic phenomenon has also contributed to a warmer planet in 2023 and the first months of 2024.
The data from Copernicus also showed that the global mean temperatures in the 12-month period were the highest on record, rising to 0.75 ºC above the 1991 to 2020 average and 1.65 ºC above the pre-industrial times (1850 to 1900).
However, the global warming threshold has not been crossed since an increase in average global temperatures of more than 1.5 ºC over several decades compared to pre-industrial temperatures is required to breach the limit.
Scientists have long warned that exceeding the 1.5 ºC threshold will irreversibly impact human and natural systems on the planet.
According to a study by 57 scientists worldwide, if humanity continues to rely on fossil fuels for energy, in 4.5 years, the planet will reach a point where crossing the global warming threshold will be unavoidable.
“We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell,” Guterres said. “The battle for 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s.”