A collaborative research team from China has published a new analysis that shows the Earth’s climate would increase by 4 ℃, compared to pre-industrial levels, before the end of 21st century.
A collaborative research team from China has published a new analysis that shows the Earth’s climate would increase by 4 ℃, compared to pre-industrial levels, before the end of 21st century.
To understand the severity of this, consider the Paris Agreement of the United Nations. It’s a global effort to prevent an increase of 2 ℃. Nearly every country on the planet—the United States is the only country to withdraw—has agreed to work to prevent the catastrophic effects of two degrees of warming. The researchers published their analysis projecting a doubling of that increase in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on May 18, 2018.
"A great many record-breaking heat events, heavy floods, and extreme droughts would occur if global warming crosses the 4 °C level, with respect to the preindustrial period,” said JIANG Dabang, a senior researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “The temperature increase would cause severe threats to ecosystems, human systems, and associated societies and economies.”
In the analysis, JIANG and his team used the parameters of scenario in which there was no mitigation of rising greenhouse gas emissions. They compared 39 coordinated climate model experiments from the fifth phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, which develops and reviews climate models to ensure the most accurate climate simulations possible.
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
