The Paris Agreement calls for efforts to limit anthropogenic global warming to less than 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels. However, natural internal variability may exacerbate anthropogenic warming to produce temporary excursions above 1.5 °C. Such excursions would not necessarily exceed the Paris Agreement, but would provide a warning that the threshold is being approached. Here we develop a new capability to predict the probability that global temperature will exceed 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels in the coming 5 years. For the period 2017 to 2021 we predict a 38% and 10% chance, respectively, of monthly or yearly temperatures exceeding 1.5 °C, with virtually no chance of the 5‐year mean being above the threshold. Our forecasts will be updated annually to provide policy makers with advanced warning of the evolving probability and duration of future warming events.

D.M.S., A.A.S., N.J.D., L.H., and R.E. were supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra and by the European Commission Horizon 2020 EUCP project (GA 776613). R.B., L.P.C., F.J.D.R., and M. M. were supported by the H2020 EUCP (GA 776613) and the Spanish MINECO CLINSA (CGL2017-85791-R) and HIATUS (CGL2015-70353-R) projects. L.P.C.’s contract is cofinanced by the MINECO under Juan de la Cierva Incorporación postdoctoral fellowship number IJCI-2015-23367. W.A.M. and H.P. acknowledge funding from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) project MiKlip (FKZ 01LP1519A). The NCAR contribution was supported by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office under Climate Variability and Predictability Program grant NA13OAR4310138, by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Collaborative Research EaSM2 grant OCE-1243015, by the Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program (RGCM) of the US Department of Energy’s, Office of Science (BER), Cooperative Agreement DE-FC02 97ER62402, and by the NSF through its sponsorship of NCAR. The NCAR simulations were generated using computational resources provided by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC02-05CH11231, as well as by an Accelerated Scientific Discovery grant for Cheyenne that was awarded by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. The EC-EARTH simulations by SMHI were performed on resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at NSC. Data used to create the figures are available at 10.5281/zenodo.1434700.

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