Monday's Major IPCC Scientific Update: We May Expect To Blow Past 1.5C In Ten Years Or Less
Can humanity drag down greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to prevent Earth’s surface from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels? That question looms larger than all others as 195 nations tussle over the UN’s first comprehensive scientific assessment of climate change since 2014, to be released Monday. And if we can, will we?
It is hard to exaggerate how urgent and politically charged these questions have become. “We need to make sure that we keep 1.5°C within reach,” UK minister and president of the critical COP26 climate summit in November, Alok Sharma, told AFP earlier this year, leaving no doubt that success at Glasgow would be measured against that yardstick.
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There is little doubt that the planet will reach that marker — and sooner than previously thought, according to sources who have seen the penultimate draft of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) text under negotiation at a plenary this week. A table under review projects the increase in global surface temperature for five emissions scenarios, ranging from wildly optimistic to unimaginably reckless. In the draft, the IPCC identifies best estimates for twenty-year periods with mid-points of 2030, 2050 and 2090. Earth’s temperature is projected to hit 1.5°C or 1.6°C around 2030 in all five scenarios — a full decade earlier than a similar prediction the IPCC made less than three years ago.
The news gets worse. By mid-century, the 1.5C threshold has been breached across the board — by a tenth of a degree along the most ambitious pathway, and by nearly a full degree at the opposite extreme. The glimmer of hope for 1.5°C is that by century’s end Earth’s surface will have cooled a notch to 1.4°C under the most optimistic “if-we-do-everything-right” storyline.
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-deadly-weather-disasters-sweep-globe-is-a-1-5c-warming-target-impossible/