While the Paris Agreement aims to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, experts won’t know when we have surpassed this threshold, a fact that could undermine global efforts to tackle climate change, scientists say.
While the Paris Agreement aims to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C, experts won’t know when we have surpassed this threshold, a fact that could undermine global efforts to tackle climate change, scientists say.
Temperatures are creeping upwards, but they are doing so unevenly. Not every year is hotter than the last, meaning warming could reach 1.5 degrees before falling and then rising again. On a monthly scale, it already has. Warming surpassed the 1.5-degree mark for one month or more in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, and again in 2023.
Measured across the entire year, 2023 will conclude 1.4 degrees hotter than the preindustrial era, and at least one of the next five years is expected to surpass 1.5 degrees. But it’s unclear at what point the world will have officially breached the Paris target, as the pact offers no clear guidance on this matter.
Read More: Yale Environment 360
A firefighter battles the 2018 Ferguson Fire in California. U.S. FOREST SERVICE
