We’ve Got Six Years Before 1.5
The window of time the world has to keep warming from reaching 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is rapidly closing, and we’re on track to see a breach of the lower-level Paris Agreement target before the end of the decade, new research finds. A study published Monday in Nature looks at the latest remaining carbon budget estimates—or the amount of fossil fuels the world can keep burning while still having a chance to limit warming to 1.5 degrees—from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, finding that we’re on track to hit that breach in about six years, in 2029. That’s three years sooner than the last estimates in 2021, which gave us until the early 2030s; continued use of fossil fuels since those estimates meant that we’ve spent our budget sooner than predicted. Scientists said that while the window for 1.5 is narrowing, the world must continue to fight to keep warming down by even the tiniest of increments. “If we limit warming to 1.6 degrees, or 1.65 degrees, or 1.7 degrees, that’s a lot better than 2 degrees,” coauthor Christopher J. Smith told the New York Times. “We still need to fight for every 10th of a degree.”
(AP, New York Times $, NPR, The Guardian)
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