UK Met Office - Potential Breach Of 1.5C In Global Average Temperature Increase By Next Summer
Global temperatures are poised to surpass a key climate threshold many thought was still years away — so quickly that some climate activists and scientists say world leaders should give up on the pretense they can still prevent disastrous levels of warming. The United Kingdom’s Met office on Thursday warned that next year’s average global temperature could breach a key planetary warming benchmark: 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. While it would not mark a permanent crossing of that barrier — natural fluctuations could make temperatures dip back below it the following year — remaining above it over a longer period of time would induce catastrophic sea level rise and make extreme heat a threat to life for 2 billion people. This year, the planet is on its brink.
And yet, as global leaders start their second week of talks at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai, the 1.5C warming target, which nations adopted in Paris in 2015, remains central. “Yes, you must make compromises. But not on 1.5 degrees,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said Friday. U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry called it a “critical guidepost.” The president of this year’s climate summit, Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, called it his “North Star,” meanwhile downplaying how dramatically humans would need to curtail fossil fuel to achieve it.
Others now deem the goal little more than wishful thinking. Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Norway, called it “increasingly embarrassing” to say the 1.5C goal is still within reach. Famed climate scientist James Hansen recently called 1.5 “deader than a doornail” and on Friday said anyone who claims otherwise is “lying.” It “now looks inevitable” that global warming will surge past the 1.5C mark, said Pierre Friedlingstein of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. That might suggest climate talks should instead hinge on whether and how humans could one day bring global temperatures back down below that threshold, instead of averting it altogether.
The emphasis on the 1.5C goal adds a note of dissonance about what is possible as policymakers at the U.N. conference, known as COP28, search for ways to cut emissions. Some speakers in Dubai have delivered their remarks about 1.5C with a pep talk fervor, and banners around the venue recite platitudes such as “Hope inspires Action.” Climate watchers say they understand why the messaging has not kept pace with the dire science. The 1.5C goal is an issue of politics and even, for some nations, survival. Smaller, low-lying countries fought to include that target in the Paris accords, and scientists have worried about how society might respond if there is widespread acknowledgment that the 1.5C target is lost. Some fear public disengagement, or a relaxation of emissions-cutting policies, if defeat is admitted.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/12/08/climate-change-threshold-cop28-dubai/
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