Hamburg, 27 September 2023 (dpa/MIA) - German climate experts warn that the consequences of global warming will have massive impacts on life on Earth, pointing to the record number of extreme weather events such as floods, heatwaves and forest fires this year.

The opportunity to stabilize the climate with relatively little effort has been missed, experts said at the beginning of the Extreme Weather Conference in the northern city of Hamburg on Wednesday.

"We have to accept that the 1.5-degree limit will be exceeded. This means that the Paris Agreement has effectively failed on this point," said Jochem Marotzke, head of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology.

"This also means that it will only be possible to keep warming below the two-degree limit with enormous efforts." Currently, he said, we are on the way to a plus-three-degree world by the end of the century.

At the United Nations climate conference in Paris in 2015, world leaders agreed to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

The extreme weather events of 2023 are a game changer, experts say.

"Never before have global air and water temperatures been as high as they are this year," a statement to the congress said. "Never before have heat records and wildfires reached such levels as in 2023."

Water temperatures five to six degrees higher in the Mediterranean region led to record levels of evaporation and subsequent rainfall in Europe and North Africa, it said.

"We all still have the terrible images of the severe weather disasters in Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Libya in front of our eyes," said Tobias Fuchs, board member at the German Weather Service.

"International climate research agrees: Any further global warming will lead to a rapid increase in weather-related natural hazards."

Photo: DPA