Extremely hot years predicted for almost all countries every two years

A new study published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment models the climate's unsettling trajectory.

The researchers used historical emissions data and pledges to cut emissions by the world's top five emitters (China, the United States, the European Union, India, and Russia) at the COP26 climate summit to predict regional warming by 2030.

Their model predicts that 92 percent of the 165 countries studied will experience extremely hot annual temperatures every two years. They define these extremely hot years as what would have been a once-in-a-century hot year in the pre-industrial era.

"It just really shows the urgency and how we're heading into a world that is just so much hotter for everybody," said Alexander Nauels of Climate Analytics, the study's co-author.

Without the emissions of the top five emitters from 1991-onwards contributing to this model, the proportion of countries affected by these extreme hot years falls to about 46 percent, highlighting the significant impact these regions have on the rest of the world.

"This is I think very important, because we usually talk about these abstract quantities of emissions, or global temperatures, which we know about, but we can't really feel. Whereas regional climate change is much closer to what we're going to experience-we're going to experience this warming in our country and this increasing frequency of extremely hot years," said Lead author Lea Beusch, of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich.

You can read more from the study here.