UN warns of highway to climate hell

May marks 12th straight month of record-breaking global temperatures

- KATE ALLEN

As the planet notched a new hot streak and scientists predicted another grim milestone on the horizon, the secretary-general of the U.N. warned Wednesday that the world needs "an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell."

Europe's climate agency announced that May marked the 12th consecutive month of recordbreaking global temperatures, a fevered year that startled many scientists because of the dramatic margins by which old records were broken. At the same time, the World Meteorological Organization predicted that at least one of the next five years is likely to temporarily break the 15 C warming threshold.

While one or two years over the 15-degree mark is not the same as tipping over that threshold in the long-term, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that we are edging closer to that being a new normal the outcome the Paris Agreement is designed to avoid and that world leaders have very little time left to avert this larger catastrophe.

"The good news is that we have control of the wheel. The battle to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees will be won or lost in the 2020s under the watch of leaders today," Guterres said in a speech on Wednesday.

"We are playing Russian roulette with our planet," he added.