By Tom Molloy
The 1.5 degrees Celsius benchmark has been breached
Recently, scientists said that in the past 12 months, the Earth was 1.5 degrees C higher than in pre-industrial times, crossing a critical barrier into temperatures never experienced by human civilizations.
According to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, the past 12 months clocked in at 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) higher on average compared with temperatures between 1850 and 1900.
“This El Niño maximum is riding on top of a base climate that is continuously warming due to climate change,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, wrote. “The combination of them is what’s giving us such hot global temperatures.”
Scientists had previously shown that holding the temperature rise to 1.5C could mean the survival of coral reefs, the preservation of Arctic sea ice and less deadly heat waves.
Momentum has gathered around the 1.5 degree benchmark — despite carbon emissions continuing to rise and that it will be necessary to cut emissions drastically by 2030 to meet the target.
There is some disagreement about what exactly counts as breaching that threshold, which will happen sometime in the 2030s absent dramatic reductions, but scientists and policymakers agree that it has to be a multiyear average, not a single 12-month period.
Most scientists say passing 1.5 C is inevitable. The Washington Post analyzed 1200 pathways modeled by scientists and economists for the world to shift to clean energy and found that only four of them showed the world achieving the 1.5 C target without using technology that doesn’t yet exist.
Scientist don’t know exactly when catastrophic aspects of changes currently underway will occur, like the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet or the release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost. Many scientists say that it’s not as though as soon as we pass that number, Antarctic ice sheets will collapse and ocean circulations will come to a stop. But many do think that for every tenth of a degree of warming, these tipping points are more likely.
Thanks for the efforts of folks like Greta Thunberg, and the senior activists of thirdACT.org and the many others trying to stop the continuation of business as usual with dirty energy.
On an unhappy note to end this already unhappy update, despite warning from scientists about manmade global warming since the 1970s, Americans continue their contrarian response to the crisis. Automobiles have been getting larger and heavier every year, diminishing the benefits of better fuel efficiency, electric cars, etc. Some cities in the EU are considering restrictions on SUVs, with Paris tripling parking fees for SUVs. And New York proposing weight-based registration fees. Too little, too late, but there it is….
