| Earth Could Soon Briefly Hit Threatening Climate Threshold Kasha Patel - The Washington Post | |
| go to original May 12, 2022 |
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'Fifty-fifty chance' of global temperatures hitting 1.5C threshold (RTÉ News)
Since signing the Paris climate agreement in 2015, nations around the world have focused on one climate goal: limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels this century. But as greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning have continued to increase, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization shows global temperatures could temporarily hit that threshold within the next five years.
The WMO stated that there is a 50 percent chance that the annual global temperature will hit this mark by 2026. The probability is only increasing with time. In 2015, the chance of temporarily observing 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming was zero, underscoring the rapid pace of human-caused climate change.
“A single year of exceedance above 1.5°C does not mean we have breached the iconic threshold of the Paris agreement, but it does reveal that we are edging ever closer to a situation where 1.5°C could be exceeded for an extended period,” Leon Hermanson, a researcher at Britain’s Met Office who led the report, said in a news release.
The projection was calculated by climate scientists across the world and uses “the best prediction systems from leading climate centers,” Hermanson said, but some scientists are wary of the prediction.
“Initialized decadal predictions (such as used here) don’t have a great track record (yet),” Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA, wrote in an email. “While I’m happy that research continues the regional predictions are not to be taken too seriously.”
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State, said that while global temperature readings may temporarily spike to the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold in the next several years, the real concern occurs when it is surpassed over a period of many years.
“When we talk about the need to avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming in a climate change context, we’re talking about the long-term trend, not the values for individual years,” he told Inside Climate News.
Hitting 1.5 degrees Celsius for an extended period may not be far off. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded last month that the world could blow past the key target within eight years. The assessment of 278 top climate experts wrote that while concerted action could avert this scenario, it “cannot be achieved through incremental change.”
Staying under the threshold, the panel concluded, would involve a coordinated push to expand renewable energy production, revamp transportation networks, extract carbon from the air, and redesign how cities are built and farming is done.
Scientists have long warned about the dangers of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming on people and the environment. Extreme heat events are more likely to take place and break previous records by large margins, as seen in the Pacific Northwest in June.
Read the rest at The Washington Post
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