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YOU might say the body Petteri Taalas heads determines the weather on world climate action. At the very least, it takes its temperature. The , based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the United Nations specialised agency on weather, climate and water resources. It co-founded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the clearing house for scientific research on global warming, and runs observing systems that follow what is happening to temperature, precipitation, storms, sea level rise, glaciers, snow and ice cover and greenhouse gas emissions across the planet.

The WMO has just produced its latest report, . It comes a few short months after Taalas, the group鈥檚 secretary general, found himself in the news for purportedly questioning the focus on the need for robust international action on climate change.

Graham Lawton: What did your report find about the state of the world鈥檚 climate?

Petteri Taalas: So far, we have seen 1 degree [Celsius] of warming. During the past 20 years, we have seen the 19 warmest years on record. Last year was the second-warmest year since 1850 [when consistent records begin].

We have, again, been breaking records in greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Of those, carbon dioxide is the most important. It has contributed two-thirds of the warming so far and its life in the atmosphere is several hundred years. Recently, we have been observing concentrations of the order of 415 parts per million; 400 ppm was once regarded as a critical level.

We have areas of the world where drought has become more frequent, including the Amazonia region, which may be bad news for the rainforest, and some areas with increased amounts of rainfall and snowfall.

We have also been monitoring what has happened to sea level. During the past century, sea level rise was typically 1 to 2 millimetres per year. During recent years, we have seen a rise of between 4 and 5 millimetres per year.

We have also seen glacier melting continue. Melting of the Greenland glacier increased threefold during the past 20 years, and the Antarctic ice cap has also started melting, which wasn鈥檛 the case 20 years ago.

Many of the impacts of climate change and disasters are through water: groundwater problems, flooding, sea level rise and so forth. Those are having impacts on global food production capacity and human well-being, especially in less developed countries.

You also found that climate change is affecting human health.

During the past 20 years, we had seen positive development when it came to hunger, but during the past five years, there has been an increase again. Compared to 2015, we have 36 million more people who are suffering from hunger, more than 800 million people altogether. And there are something like 30,000 casualties on a daily basis.

Another result is that we have a growing amount of people who are exposed to heatwaves. Twenty years ago, we had about 20 million people exposed to heatwaves on an annual basis. During the past three years, we have exceeded 200 million people per year. We have seen health impacts because of this. In the 2010 European heatwave, we got 50,000 casualties, mainly in Russia. In 2003, we had 75,000 casualties in central Europe.

What did your report, which predates the coronavirus pandemic, predict for the future?

We expect the trends we are already seeing to continue. Some estimates give a 10 per cent probability that we will reach the lower limit of the Paris Agreement [the international accord on limiting climate change, signed in 2016], a 1.5 degree increase, during the coming five years, at least temporarily. And since we have recently seen warming of the order of 0.4 degrees per decade, if that continues for the coming 10 years, it鈥檚 very likely that we would exceed 1.5 degrees. That鈥檚 somewhat striking.

You are known to be a climate optimist. Are you still one after this new report?

Yes, because the covid-19 crisis will change the world. It鈥檚 going to have impacts on the mentality of people and governments. One could say that this is the mentality that would be needed in solving the climate problem.

You鈥檙e saying that the pandemic proved that it is possible for the world to take the drastic action needed to stave off a climate crisis?

Yes, that鈥檚 what I think. And actually, the good news is that you don鈥檛 need such drastic action. The conversion of energy systems, transport systems and industry should happen gradually, not as dramatically as we have seen in tackling this crisis. We have much more time than with covid-19.

Governments are going to invest in recovery, and there鈥檚 an opportunity to tackle the climate as part of the recovery programme. In the best case, we would invest in new types of climate technologies.

A pessimist would say that we will forget this problem and target our resources to economic recovery only. But there is an opportunity to start bending the curve in the coming five years.

We have heard much about positive environmental side effects of the pandemic. Can you put them into perspective?

We expect that there will be a drop in carbon emissions because of this pandemic crisis and its impact on industry and traffic, and so forth. But this is not going to have a major impact on climate because of the very long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

There are many people who don鈥檛 understand that the lifetime of these gases is very long, especially carbon dioxide.

But once we have been able to drop emissions, it鈥檚 a question of whether we could continue along the same line in the future.

We have learned to telework, and that will reduce traffic emissions once you are not forced to commute every day to your office. We have had big international meetings by videoconference. The need to travel so much may be smaller after this experience.

There are also people who may have learned to be more modest in their consumption. If that is carried over, it would help us in tackling the climate problems. Personally, I鈥檓 optimistic. But let鈥檚 see what happens in practice.

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Shouldn鈥檛 we focus on covid-19 for now and leave the climate crisis for later?

Covid-19 is causing casualties in the short-term, and there will be economic impacts of the order of a few years. But if we are not able to mitigate climate change, then we will see persistent health impacts and economic impacts, and the magnitude will be much higher than the ones that we are facing with this short-term crisis. If you compare casualties from hunger, the numbers are already much higher than the covid-19 casualties.

What is going on with the UN climate negotiations planned for later in 2020?

COP26 was supposed to take place in Glasgow this November. It鈥檚 going to be delayed to next year. But what I have heard from the UK government is that its ambition still remains, and this meeting will be organised in the spring or fall of 2021. There鈥檚 no intention to give up this climate mitigation mood that we have.

I imagine you hope the climate negotiations will resume as soon as possible so the present crisis is still fresh in people鈥檚 minds.

I think that would be good, because now we have been facing this smaller-scale crisis, people may use the same sentiment in tackling this major, looming crisis.

鈥淭he good news is we don鈥檛 need such drastic action on climate change as we did on covid-19鈥�

You have previously said that you had detected a shift in sentiment on climate. Do you think that the current crisis has enhanced that?

Yes, that鈥檚 what I think. The tone that I have heard so far, including from [UN secretary general] Ant脫nio Guterres and my colleagues in the UN, is that this sentiment that we鈥檙e having globally at the moment would help us in mitigation for climate change.

We are also discussing with private sector players, who are critical. There was already a desire to be more active in mitigation efforts. I expect that will continue. In the US, we have a growing amount of private sector players who are interested in being part of the solution. We have also heard from major fossil fuel companies like BP and Shell that they have a target to become carbon neutral by 2050. So, good news.

Of course, the official US government position is quite passive, but many individual states have fairly ambitious climate mitigation programmes. And actually, the US has already fulfilled half of its Paris pledges.

It seems clear that deforestation and the wildlife trade let the virus jump into humans, and that there are more where it came from. Does climate change also make the risk of such zoonotic diseases worse?

So far, there鈥檚 no evidence that links the covid-19 disease to climate matters. But some diseases are very sensitive to climate.

Dozens of diseases are somehow dependent on weather. And once we change the climate zones and patterns, we also change the regions where we can see outbreaks of some of these diseases. We used to have malaria in southern Europe in the past, and the return of malaria to Europe is one of the potential consequences. Cholera outbreaks are also related to weather.

You made headlines last year when it was reported that you had in a newspaper interview in your native Finland.

I stated that some of the horror stories around climate science don鈥檛 have a very solid basis, and some tipping points that some scientists have been promoting aren鈥檛 the result of climate modelling. Personally, I believe in measurements or calculations. If certain risks are shown by the climate models, then they are, to me, real. Climate sceptics would be happy to see somebody who would question the climate science. That was one of the issues. There were some sceptics who were thinking that I鈥檓 not behind the UN climate reports, which is not the case. I was only questioning alarmist stories.

Finland seems to have been very successful in dealing with both the pandemic and the wider climate crisis. Do you think that holds any lessons for the rest of the world?

I think sometimes things are easier in a small country than a big country. And Finland is a country where it鈥檚 often easy to find some sort of consensus. There are three or four bigger parties who form coalition governments, and the nature of the government work has always been that you are forced to find some compromises. That鈥檚 not always the case in the USA or the UK, for example, where there are two parties that are sometimes in power and things are fairly black and white. In Finland, this kind of consensus approach may have been one of the positive things.