Human-induced warming to exceed Paris Agreement limit by 2037, analysis shows

Yves is here. Another data point indicating that global warming is ahead of schedule. Ugh.

On the one hand, decision makers on the East Coast may finally get a wake-up call. At the time I lived in New York, the area from Washington to Boston seemed to benefit from global warming, with milder winters and summers.

But countries need to be very ambitious to make a real difference:

Grace van Dilen. Originally posted on New LED

Human-caused global warming is expected to exceed 2.7° Fahrenheit (1.5° Celsius) by 2037, surpassing an international target beyond which severe climate disruption could become the norm. new analysis from 50 climatologists.

“This is unprecedented in everything we have seen in history,” said Piers Forster, professor at the University of Leeds and author of the paper. Forster is also the author of several climate reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is widely considered the international authority on climate science.

The 2016 Paris Agreement, which almost every country in the world has signed, set an international goal to stop warming at 2.7° Fahrenheit. Beyond this point, the effects of climate change will intensify, scientists say, leading to widespread coral reef extinction, the usual heatwaves and devastating flooding of coastal cities. The study found that the global temperature rise reached 2.05° Fahrenheit over the past decade.

The planet is also warming faster, with temperatures rising by an unprecedented 0.36° Fahrenheit since 2013, according to a new article published today in the magazine. Earth systems science data.

“This is a critical decade for climate change,” Forster said in a statement. “Decisions made now will affect how much the temperature rises and the extent and severity of the impacts we see as a result.”

The scientists’ analysis also provides an update on humanity’s remaining carbon balance — the amount of greenhouse gas emissions humans can still emit to stay below the 2.7° Fahrenheit limit. According to the document, the remaining carbon balance has halved since the IPCC calculated it in 2020. Now humans have only 250 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to emit, compared to 500 gigatonnes available just three years ago, which means business as usual. The activity is expected to exhaust the carbon budget by 2029.

“If we don’t want to see [IPCC] the target disappears in our rearview mirror, the world must work much harder and urgently to reduce emissions,” Forster said in a statement.

Greenhouse gas emissions have reached an all-time high in the past decade. In 2021, emissions have risen to over 54 gigatons of carbon dioxide. The remaining carbon budget is “very small” in the context of humanity’s annual emissions, said Joerie Rogel, professor of climatology at Imperial College London and author of the paper. Rogel is also the author of IPCC reports.

Greenhouse gas emissions now match those in 2019, just before the coronavirus pandemic triggered worldwide lockdowns, he said.

As the climate changes faster, scientists must also keep pace with their analyses, Forster said. While the IPCC reports valuable and comprehensive climate information, it only publishes its main estimates every five to ten years. Today’s new study is an attempt to fill in the gaps left by the IPCC assessment cycle.

The new article is part of an initiative launched today led by Forster and the University of Leeds called Global Climate Change Project Indicatorswhich aims to update climate analysis annually to inform people about the climate crisis.

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