Governments have begun setting rules to implement the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate change as Nasa revealed figures showing that temperature records were broken again during the hottest April to date.
Climate change experts began a 10-day meeting in Germany, the first since the environmental accord involving 195 countries was agreed in Paris in December, aimed at mapping out the detail on how the accord would work in practice.
Monthly temperatures continue to soar, and at record higher levels. April’s figures broke the previous record for the month by the largest margin ever registered, making it three straight months that records have been broken by the biggest margin.
April was the seventh month in a row to break temperature records based on statistics dating back to the 19th century.
The temperature of the land and sea was 1.11 degrees warmer last month than the average temperature for April during the period from 1951 to 1980, putting 2016 on course to be the hottest year on record, and likely by the largest margin.
Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary on the UN’s framework convention on climate change, told a climate conference in Bonn that the record temperatures were partly caused by the El Niño climate pattern in the Pacific but that it was exacerbated by the accumulation of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The Costa Rican diplomat said that governments had “no other option but to accelerate” actions to limit global warming when asked about the latest Nasa figures. “The Paris agreement represents the foundations – now we have to raise the walls, the roof of a common home,” France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal said at at news conference at the start of UN talks that continue until May 26th.
While the agreement set targets to move to environmentally sustainable energy by the end of this century, it has yet to be determined how governments will track their plans to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
Even before April’s record-breaking temperatures, 2016 was on the way to being the hottest year for the planet in known history based on the first three months of the year.
US president Barack Obama has said that the unusually cold temperatures experienced in the northeast of the country did not mean that climate change was not happening. In an address at Rutgers University in New Jersey on Sunday, he said: “Listen, climate change is not something subject to political spin. There is evidence. There are facts. We can see it happening right now.”
