Latest news with #1.5C
BBC News
a day ago
- Science
- BBC News
Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, leading scientists warn
EPA The Earth could be doomed to breach the symbolic 1.5C warming limit in as little as three years at current levels of carbon dioxide emissions. That's the stark warning from more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists in the most up-to-date assessment of the state of global warming. Nearly 200 countries agreed to try to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above levels of the late 1800s in a landmark agreement in 2015, with the aim of avoiding some of the worst impacts of climate change. But countries have continued to burn record amounts of coal, oil and gas and chop down carbon-rich forests - leaving that international goal in peril. Climate change has already worsened many weather extremes - such as the UK's 40C heat in July 2022 - and has rapidly raised global sea levels, threatening coastal communities. "Things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds. "We're seeing some unprecedented changes and we're also seeing the heating of the Earth and sea-level rise accelerating as well." These changes "have been predicted for some time and we can directly place them back to the very high level of emissions", he added. At the beginning of 2020, scientists estimated that humanity could only emit 500 billion more tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) - the most important planet-warming gas - for a 50% chance of keeping warming to 1.5C. But by the start of 2025 this so-called "carbon budget" had shrunk to 130 billion tonnes, according to the new study. That reduction is largely due to continued record emissions of CO2 and other planet-warming greenhouse gases like methane, but also improvements in the scientific estimates. If global CO2 emissions stay at their current highs of about 40 billion tonnes a year, 130 billion tonnes gives the world roughly three years until that carbon budget is exhausted. This could commit the world to breaching the target set by the Paris agreement, the researchers say, though the planet would probably not pass 1.5C of human-caused warming until a few years later. Last year was the first on record when global average air temperatures were more than 1.5C above those of the late 1800s. A single 12-month period isn't considered a breach of the Paris agreement, however, with the record heat of 2024 given an extra boost by natural weather patterns. But human-caused warming was by far the main reason for last year's high temperatures, reaching 1.36C above pre-industrial levels, the researchers estimate. This current rate of warming is about 0.27C per decade – much faster than anything in the geological record. And if emissions stay high, the planet is on track to reach 1.5C of warming on that metric around the year 2030. After this point, long-term warming could, in theory, be brought back down by sucking large quantities of CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But the authors urge caution on relying on these ambitious technologies serving as a get-out-of-jail card. "For larger exceedance [of 1.5C], it becomes less likely that removals [of CO2] will perfectly reverse the warming caused by today's emissions," warned Joeri Rogelj, professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London. 'Every fraction of warming' matters The study is filled with striking statistics highlighting the magnitude of the climate change that has already happened. Perhaps the most notable is the rate at which extra heat is accumulating in the Earth's climate system, known as "Earth's energy imbalance" in scientific jargon. Over the past decade or so, this rate of heating has been more than double that of the 1970s and 1980s and an estimated 25% higher than the late 2000s and 2010s. "That's a really large number, a very worrying number" over such a short period, said Dr Matthew Palmer of the UK Met Office, and associate professor at the University of Bristol. The recent uptick is fundamentally due to greenhouse gas emissions, but a reduction in the cooling effect from small particles called aerosols has also played a role. This extra energy has to go somewhere. Some goes into warming the land, raising air temperatures, and melting the world's ice. But about 90% of the excess heat is taken up by the oceans. That not only means disruption to marine life but also higher sea levels: warmer ocean waters take up more space, in addition to the extra water that melting glaciers are adding to our seas. The rate of global sea-level rise has doubled since the 1990s, raising the risks of flooding for millions of people living in coastal areas worldwide. PA Media While this all paints a bleak picture, the authors note that the rate of emissions increases appears to be slowing as clean technologies are rolled out. They argue that "rapid and stringent" emissions cuts are more important than ever. The Paris target is based on very strong scientific evidence that the impacts of climate change would be far greater at 2C of warming than at 1.5C. That has often been oversimplified as meaning below 1.5C of warming is "safe" and above 1.5C "dangerous". In reality, every extra bit of warming increases the severity of many weather extremes, ice melt and sea-level rise. "Reductions in emissions over the next decade can critically change the rate of warming," said Prof Rogelj. "Every fraction of warming that we can avoid will result in less harm and less suffering of particularly poor and vulnerable populations and less challenges for our societies to live the lives that we desire," he added. Sign up for our Future Earth newsletter to keep up with the latest climate and environment stories with the BBC's Justin Rowlatt. Outside the UK? Sign up to our international newsletter here.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Science
- The Guardian
Only two years left of world's carbon budget to meet 1.5C target, scientists warn
The planet's remaining carbon budget to meet the international target of 1.5C has just two years left at the current rate of emissions, scientists have warned, showing how deep into the climate crisis the world has fallen. Breaching the target would ramp up the extreme weather already devastating communities around the world. It would also require carbon dioxide to be sucked from the atmosphere in future to restore the stable climate in which the whole of civilisation developed over the past 10,000 years. The carbon budget is how much planet-heating CO2 can still be emitted by humanity while leaving a reasonable chance that the temperature target is not blown. The latest assessment by leading climate scientists found that in order to achieve a 66% chance of keeping below the 1.5C target, emissions from 2025 onwards must be limited to 80bn tonnes of CO2. That is 80% lower than it was in 2020. Emissions reached a new record high in 2024: at that rate the 80bn tonne budget would be exhausted within two years. Lags in the climate system mean the 1.5C limit, which is measured as a multi-year average, would inevitably be passed a few years later, the scientists said. Scientists have been warning for some time that breaching the 1.5C limit is increasingly unavoidable as emissions from the burning of fossil fuels continue to rise. The latest analysis shows global emissions would have to plummet towards zero within just a few years to have any decent chance of keeping to the target. That appears extremely unlikely, given that emissions in 2024 rose yet again. However, the scientists emphasised every fraction of a degree of global heating increases human suffering, so efforts to cut emissions must ramp up as fast as possible. Currently, the world is on track for 2.7C of global heating, which would be a truly catastrophic rise. The analysis shows, for example, that limiting the rise to 1.7C is more achievable: the carbon budget for a 66% chance of keeping below 1.7C is 390bn tonnes, which is about nine years at the current rate of emissions. 'The remaining carbon budgets are declining rapidly and the main reason is the world's failure to curb global CO2 emissions,' said Prof Joeri Rogelj, at Imperial College London, UK. 'Under any course of action now, there is a very high chance we will reach and even exceed 1.5C and even higher levels of warming.' 'The best moment to have started serious climate action was 1992, when the UN [climate] convention was adopted,' he said. 'But now every year is the best year to start being serious about emissions reduction. That is because every fraction of warming we can avoid will result in less harm and suffering, particularly for poor and vulnerable populations, and in less challenges to living the lives we desire.' Rogelj said it was crucial that countries commit to big emissions cuts at the UN Cop30 climate summit in November. The hottest year on record was 2024, fuelled by increasing coal and gas burning, and setting an annual average of 1.5C for the first time. There is no sign yet of the transition away from fossil fuels promised by the world's nations at Cop28 in Dubai in December 2023. Sign up to Down to Earth The planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essential after newsletter promotion Solar and wind energy production is increasing rapidly and has precluded previous worst-case scenarios of 4-5C of global heating. But energy demand is rising even faster, leading to more fossil fuel burning and turbo-charging extreme weather disasters. The analysis, produced by an international team of 60 leading climate scientists, is an update of the critical indicators of climate change and is published in the journal Earth System Science Data. It aims to provide an authoritative assessment, based on the methods of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but published annually unlike the intermittent IPCC reports, the most recent of which was 2021. The study found that the Earth's energy imbalance – the excess heat trapped by the greenhouse effect – has risen by 25% when comparing the past decade with the decade before. 'That's a really large and very worrying number,' said Prof Piers Forster, at the University of Leeds, UK, and lead author of the study. 'I tend to be an optimistic person. But things are not only moving in the wrong direction, we're seeing some unprecedented changes and acceleration of the heating of the Earth and sea level rise.' Sea level rise has doubled in the past 10 years, compared with the period 1971-2018, the analysis found, rising to 4mm per year. The flooding of coasts will become unmanageable at 1.5C of global heating and lead to 'catastrophic inland migration', a study in May found. Sea level is rising because about 90% of global heating is absorbed by the oceans, making the water expand, and because the climate crisis is melting glaciers and ice caps. Dr Karina Von Schuckmann, at Mercator Ocean International, said: 'Warmer waters also lead to intensified weather extremes, and can have devastating impacts on marine ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. In 2024, the ocean reached record values globally.'
Canada Standard
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Canada Standard
2030 Biodiversity Target Was Always a Long Shot, UK Official Says
When negotiators in Montreal agreed in 2022 to halt and reverse global biodiversity loss by 2030, many knew the goal was ambitious, says a former United Kingdom negotiator-but the targets were about more than just hitting the numbers. In an interview with Carbon Brief, William Lockhart, who represented the UK at United Nations nature negotiations from 2021 to early 2025, expressed ambivalence about whether countries can meet the conservation targets of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), aimed at reversing biodiversity loss within five years. It remains possible with "the right interventions at exactly the right scale," he said, but countries are not on a trajectory to make it happen. But the numbers attached to the targets aren't the main point of the COP negotiations, Lockhart added. View our latest digests "The important thing is that people spent a lot of time thinking about why we were setting certain kinds of targets," he said, adding that while targets should be specific, measurable and achievable, there were open questions about what those criteria meant, and what message they were meant to send. "This is politics; this isn't necessarily science." More than half the countries that submitted plans to the UN did not commit to protecting 30% of their territories for nature-a target as important to biodiversity conservation as the 1.5C pathway is for climate action, writes Carbon Brief. "Countries have never fully met any target to help nature since the UN biodiversity convention was established in the 1990s." Lockhart questioned the role of UN summits like the COPs and whether they can be effective for global action. In one sense, he said, the world is asking too much of the COPs, "there's so much coverage and intense scrutiny." "'This person's arrived', 'this comma has moved'...There's an extraordinary media circus." But the world also asks too little of the COPs, he added, because success and failure hinges on details as small as particular words, while overall progress stalls. Lockhart said he and his colleagues worry that the COPs are being seen as ends in themselves. "We agree on stuff," he told Carbon Brief. But that stuff "doesn't get delivered, by and large," because "political factors, capability factors, jurisdictional factors, all sorts of different things" undermine implementation processes. "The problem is that by focusing on COPs as an end to themselves, we risk missing the wood for the trees." Still, Lockhart hasn't given up on the talks. "It's extremely important, in my view, that you have a space where the whole world can come together in a room and agree that it wants to do something," he said. If targets like those in the GBF aren't achievable, "then the question is: 'Why did the world agree to it?'" he asked. "And the answer to that is: 'Because it matters that we try.'" Source: The Energy Mix
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
U.K. Activists Stage Mock Funeral for 1.5°C Climate Target
As President Donald Trump continues to bow down at the altar of the fossil fuel industry and decimates federal commitments to confront the worsening climate crisis, activist groups in the United Kingdom took to the streets to grieve over losses and organize for renewed action. Today, Extinction Rebellion Cambridge and other activist groups held a mock funeral for the 1.5°C target that international policymakers agreed to in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to limit global average temperature rises above pre-industrial levels. The other groups involved included Extinction Rebellion U.K., Cambridge Greenpeace, Cambridge Stop the War, and the Organisation of Radical Cambridge Activists. A solemn procession around Cambridge city centre was led by two dozen 'Red Rebels' — silent performers dressed in red with their faces painted stark white. The procession, which included a black funeral casket representing the death of the 1.5°C target, passed through the Lion Yard, where a banner reading, 'No future on a dead planet,' was lowered from the first floor as the march passed underneath. In 2015, world leaders gathered at the United Nations Conference of Parties in Paris where they signed the Paris Climate Accord, agreeing to limit global average temperature rises to 'well below' 2°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, with a target of 1.5 °C. The rallying cry, '1.5 to stay alive!' was regularly repeated by activists during both negotiations and protests inside and outside of the conference, who also demanded the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels. In 2015, temperatures had already risen by 1°C above pre-industrial levels, due to the actions of the fossil fuel industry and the continued use of fossil fuels. Despite these promises, global average temperatures smashed through the 1.5°C target in 2024 — just a quarter of a way through the century. The breach needs to be sustained for a decade or more for politicians to agree that 1.5°C has been exceeded — but many scientists say that the target has now been missed, with one describing it as 'deader than a doornail.' Trump removed the United States from the Paris Climate Accord upon taking office and has refused to uphold pledged financial commitments to support climate resilience, adaptation, and the transition away from fossil fuels at home or abroad. The procession in Cambridge marked 'the enormity and sadness of this moment,' Alex Martin of Extinction Rebellion Cambridge said in a statement. 'We felt we needed a physical space where we could grieve together for what we are losing and reflect on how to respond to the challenge now in front of us.' While sounding the death knell of the 1.5°C target, participants in today's funeral procession 'pledged to step up where politicians have failed,' seeing the action as 'a rallying cry to the public to join the many organizations and groups striving to limit temperature rises and prevent the worst effects of climate collapse,' according to the statement. The groups sought to 'highlight that while it can feel overwhelming to act alone, coming together as part of a supportive community can be a powerful force for change.' 'Every fraction of a degree of warming we can prevent will save lives,' said Zoe Flint, a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion Cambridge in a statement: 'We call on everyone to do what they can to protect people and planet, while there is still time to prevent the worst harm.' Extinction Rebellion is a decentralized, international, and nonpartisan movement that uses nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to persuade governments to act to solve the climate crisis. In April 2024, 400 'Red Rebels' and hundreds of mourners in black held a Funeral for Nature procession through the historic city streets of Bath, culminating in a dramatic finale in front of the Abbey. More from Rolling Stone AOC Warns Republicans Are 'Robbing People' to Pay for Billionaire Tax Cuts What It's Really Like to Face Off with a Grizzly - and Live to Tell the Tale Trump Says Republicans Should 'Probably Not' Tax the Rich Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
