GLOBAL warming has exceeded 1.5°C across an entire year for the first time, climate experts reported today.

Scientists have long said that the long-term rise in temperature needed to be limited to 1.5°C to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

A landmark United Nations report in 2018 said that the risks of more intense heat waves, rising sea levels and loss of wildlife were much higher at 2°C of warming than at 1.5°C.

The new data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service does not represent a breach of the 2015 Paris Agreement, where world leaders committed to the target, but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long term.

Copernicus deputy director Samantha Burgess said: “Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global temperatures from increasing.”

Royal Meteorological Society chief executive Professor Liz Bentley said: “To go over 1.5°C of warming on an annual average is significant.

“It’s another step in the wrong direction. But we know what we’ve got to do.”

World Meteorological Organisation chief Celeste Saulo agreed that the rate of human-caused climate change is accelerating.

She said that this has triggered more Arctic cold outbreaks in North America and Europe.

Ms Saulo said: “We have a trend that is really worrying. The trend is very clear.”

She said the world needs to act quickly, but she said there are powerful economic forces that keep that from happening.

Slow efforts to curb climate change are “not about diplomacy, I think it’s about power and economy.

“We are lagging behind our objectives because of economic interests  that are well beyond what our common sense, our diplomats and our scientists are pointing out.”

Last year, former Nasa top climate scientist James Hansen and others published a study warning that the climate is not just getting warmer, but the rate of change is accelerating. 

A second study found ocean heat content, where much of Earth’s trapped energy is stored, is rising at a faster rate than before. 

Ms Saulo said one of the things that concerned her is not knowing what the warming temperatures actually mean for the future.

“We are not there in terms of our scientific understanding of the implications of this acceleration.

“We don’t fully understand how it is going to evolve,” she said.