Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumOh Well!! UN 1.5C Goal "Deader Than A Doornail" - Climatologist Zeke Hausfather On Record-Crushing Temps In 2024
Although a single year above 1.5C does not itself spell climate doom or break the 2015 Paris agreement, in which countries agreed to strive to keep the long-term temperature rise below this point, scientists have warned this aspiration has in effect been snuffed out despite the exhortations of leaders currently gathered at a United Nations climate summit in Azerbaijan. The goal to avoid exceeding 1.5C is deader than a doornail. Its almost impossible to avoid at this point because weve just waited too long to act, said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. We are speeding past the 1.5C line an accelerating way and that will continue until global emissions stop climbing.
Last year was so surprisingly hot, even in the context of the climate crisis, that it caused some soul-searching among climate scientists, Hausfather said. In recent months there has also been persistent heat despite the fading of El Niño, a periodic climate event that exacerbated temperatures already elevated by the burning of fossil fuels. Its going to be the hottest year by an unexpectedly large margin. If it continues to be this warm its a worrying sign, he said. Going past 1.5C this year is very symbolic, and its a sign that we are getting ever closer to going past that target.
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Yet the 1.5C target now appears to be simply a rhetorical, rather than scientifically achievable, one, bar massive amounts of future carbon removal from as-yet unproven technologies. I never thought 1.5C was a conceivable goal. I thought it was a pointless thing, said Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at Nasa. Im totally unsurprised, like almost all climate scientists, that we are shooting past it at a rapid clip. But it was extremely galvanizing, so I was wrong about that. Maybe it is useful; maybe people do need impossible targets. You shouldnt ask scientists how to galvanize the world because clearly we dont have a fucking clue. People havent got a magic set of words to keep us to 1.5C, but we have got to keep trying.
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The worlds decision-makers who are collectively failing to stem dangerous global heating will soon be joined by Donald Trump, who is expected to tear down climate policies and thereby, the Cat report estimates, add at least a further 0.04C to the world temperature. Despite this bleak outlook, some do point out that the picture still looks far rosier than it did before the Paris deal, when a catastrophic temperature rise of 4C or more was foreseeable. Cheap and abundant clean energy is growing at a rapid pace, with peak oil demand expected by the end of this decade.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/18/climate-crisis-world-temperature-target
CrispyQ
(38,220 posts)Really? Where?
Many, many years ago Dennis Miller said in one of his routines, "What do I care if the world is three degrees hotter for my great-great-grandkids? And therein is part of our problem. What a different world if we'd adopted Native American's seven generations philosophy. Instead, we look one quarter ahead.
OKIsItJustMe
(20,677 posts)James Hansen, Pushker Kharecha, Makiko Sato
The COP28 Chairman and the United Nations Secretary General say that the goal to keep global warming below 1.5°C is alive, albeit barely, implying that the looser goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement (to keep warming well below 2°C) is still viable. We find that even the 2°C goal is dead if policy is limited to emission reductions and plausible CO₂ removal. IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which advises the UN) has understated global warming in the pipeline and understated fossil fuel emissions in the pipeline via lack of realism in the Integrated Assessment Models that IPCC uses for climate projections. Wishful thinking as a policy approach must be replaced by transparent climate analysis, knowledge of the forcings that drive climate change, and realistic assessment of policy options. The next several years provide a narrow window of time to define actions that could still achieve a bright future for todays young people. We owe young people the knowledge and the tools to continually assess the situation and devise and adjust the course of action.