Was the world’s most influential climate target doomed from the start?
Story by Kate Yoder • 1d
In 2015, when the countries of the world hammered out the Paris Agreement, they committed to limiting global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and “pursuing efforts” toward keeping them below 1.5 degrees C. The plan didn’t work out so well. Ten years later, the planet might have crossed that lower threshold sooner than expected.
A pair of new studies in the journal Nature Climate Change looked at historical data and came to the conclusion that the record heat last year — the first year to surpass 1.5 degrees C — wasn’t a temporary fluke, but a sign that the world is now soaring past this influential climate target over the long term. The new year continued that upward trajectory. Even as a natural cooling pattern called La Niña took hold recently, January managed to be hotter than ever, clocking in at a record 1.75 degrees C warmer than the preindustrial average.
One analysis of the two studies warned that Earth had entered a “frightening new phase.” It’s a reflection of the language that has been used around 1.5 C ever since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-backed team of leading climate experts, wrote an influential report in 2018 on the consequences of exceeding that threshold, which it estimated would happen in 2030. Headlines warned that the world had 12 years to avert climate catastrophe. The line was echoed by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York. So is the world now at the edge of disaster?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/was-the-world-s-most-influential-climate-target-doomed-from-the-start/ar-AA1z2sW7?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=16bd33d129844a379de0b3e073a1c86f&ei=109
