Latest news with #EarthSystemScienceData
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Humanity could be just 3 years away from crossing a dire climate threshold, report warns
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Record greenhouse gas emissions could exhaust Earth's "carbon budget" in as little as three years, dooming the planet to breach the symbolic threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warming. Global warming of 2 C (3.6 F) is considered an important threshold — warming beyond this greatly increases the likelihood of devastating and irreversible climate breakdown that include extreme heatwaves, droughts and the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries pledged to limit global temperature rises to ideally 1.5 C and safely below 2 C. Yet, according to a new assessment by more than 60 of the world's leading climate scientists, this target is quickly moving out of reach — only 143 billion tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide remains before we have likely exceeded the Paris Agreement target, and humanity is already releasing over 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) each year. The researchers published their findings June 19 in the journal Earth System Science Data. "The window to stay within 1.5 C is rapidly closing," study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, said in a statement. "Global warming is already affecting the lives of billions of people around the world. Every small increase in warming matters, leading to more frequent, more intense weather extremes." Warnings that the Earth is careening beyond the 1.5 C limit, and the dire consequences that would follow from such a breach, are not new. In 2020, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated Earth's remaining climate budget to be around 550 billion tons (500 billion metric tons). Related: Earth's energy imbalance is rising much faster than scientists expected — and now researchers worry they might lose the means to figure out why Yet with emissions reaching record highs in the years since, and the next IPCC report not due until 2029, the scientists behind the new annual study wanted to fill the gap. The paper made its assessment by looking at 10 indicators of climate change, including net greenhouse gas emissions, Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, sea-level rises, global temperature extremes, and the remaining budget. The scientists' analysis makes for alarming reading, with warming occurring at a rate of about 0.49 F (0.27 C) each decade and the world standing at about 2.2 F (1.24 C) above preindustrial averages. This is causing extra heat to accumulate at more than double the rate seen in the 1970s and 1980s, and Earth is trapping heat 25% faster in this decade than it did in the last. Around 90% of this excess heat is being trapped in the oceans, disrupting marine ecosystems, melting ice and causing sea levels to rise at double the rate they were in the 1990s. RELATED STORIES —Climate wars are approaching — and they will redefine global conflict —Kids born today are going to grow up in a hellscape, grim climate study finds —Global carbon emissions reach new record high in 2024, with no end in sight, scientists say "Since 1900, the global mean sea level has risen by around 228 mm. This seemingly small number is having an outsized impact on low-lying coastal areas, making storm surges more damaging and causing more coastal erosion, posing a threat to humans and coastal ecosystems," co-author Aimée Slangen, a climatologist at the NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, said in the statement. "The concerning part is that we know that sea-level rise in response to climate change is relatively slow, which means that we have already locked in further increases in the coming years and decades." The consequences of this warming are likely to hit humanity hard, with one recent study suggesting that yields of key crops such as maize and wheat in the U.S., China and Russia could drop by up to 40% before the end of the century. Another study has suggested an unprecedented global increase in drought severity is already underway, with 30% of Earth's land area experiencing moderate to extreme drought in 2022. Nonetheless, the report also stressed that global greenhouse gas emissions will likely peak this decade before decreasing. But for this to happen, we must continue to rapidly adopt wind, solar and other clean energy sources, while drastically reducing carbon emissions, the authors noted. "Emissions over the next decade will determine how soon and how fast 1.5°C of warming is reached," Rogelj said. "They need to be swiftly reduced to meet the climate goals of the Paris Agreement."
IOL News
12 hours ago
- Science
- IOL News
Warning signs on climate flashing bright red: top scientists
The planet's energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat. Image: Alan Kearney / Connect Images via AFP From carbon pollution to sea-level rise to global heating, the pace and level of key climate change indicators are all in uncharted territory, more than 60 top scientists warned Thursday. Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation hit a new high in 2024 and averaged, over the last decade, a record 53.6 billion tonnes per year -- that is 100,000 tonnes per minute -- of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases, they reported in a peer-reviewed update. Earth's surface temperature last year breached 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels for the first time, and the additional CO2 humanity can emit with a two-thirds chance of staying under that threshold long-term -- our 1.5C "carbon budget" -- will be exhausted in two years, they calculated. Investment in clean energy outpaced investment in oil, gas and coal last year two-to-one, but fossil fuels account for more than 80 percent of global energy consumption, and growth in renewables still lags behind new demand. Included in the 2015 Paris climate treaty as an aspirational goal, the 1.5C limit has since been validated by science as necessary for avoiding a catastrophically climate-addled world. The hard cap on warming to which nearly 200 nations agreed was "well below" two degrees, commonly interpreted to mean 1.7C to 1.8C. With the 1.5C level now expected to be breached in the coming years, "we are already in crunch time for these higher levels of warming," co-author Joeri Rogelj, a professor of climate science and policy at Imperial College London, told journalists in a briefing. "The next three or four decades is pretty much the timeline over which we expect a peak in warming to happen." 'The wrong direction' No less alarming than record heat and carbon emissions is the gathering pace at which these and other climate indicators are shifting, according to the study, published in Earth System Science Data. Human-induced warming increased over the last decade at a rate "unprecedented in the instrumental record", and well above the 2010-2019 average registered in the UN's most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, in 2021. The new findings -- led by the same scientists using essentially the same methods -- are intended as an authoritative albeit unofficial update of the benchmark IPCC reports underpinning global climate diplomacy. They should be taken as a reality check by policymakers, the authors suggested. "If you look at this year's update, things are all moving in the wrong direction," said lead author Piers Forster, head of the University of Leed's Priestley Centre for Climate Futures. The rate at which sea levels have shot up in recent years is also alarming, the scientists said. After creeping up, on average, well under two millimetres per year from 1901 to 2018, global oceans have risen 4.3 mm annually since 2019. What happens next? An increase in the ocean watermark of 23 centimetres (nine inches) over the last 125 years has been enough to imperil many small island states and hugely amplify the destructive power of storm surges worldwide. An additional 20 centimetres of sea level rise by 2050 would cause $1 trillion in flood damage annually in the world's 136 largest coastal cities, earlier research has shown. Another indicator underlying all the changes in the climate system is Earth's so-called energy imbalance, the difference between the amount of solar energy entering the atmosphere and the smaller amount leaving it. So far, 91 percent of human-caused warming has been absorbed by oceans, sparing life on land. But the planet's energy imbalance has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and scientists do not know how long oceans will continue to massively soak up this excess heat. Dire future climate impacts worse than what the world has already experienced are already baked in over the next decade or two. But beyond that, the future is in our hands, the scientists made clear. "We will rapidly reach a level of global warming of 1.5C, but what happens next depends on the choices which will be made," said co-author and former IPCC co-chair Valerie Masson-Delmotte. The Paris Agreement's 1.5C target allows for the possibility of ratcheting down global temperatures below that threshold before century's end. Ahead of a critical year-end climate summit in Brazil, international cooperation has been weakened by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. "Governments, financiers, and businesses must put this (report) in focus in the run-up to COP30 in Brazil," said David King, former UK Chief Scientific Advisor and Chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group. "If today's data tells us anything, it's that we do not have time to delay any further."
NDTV
20 hours ago
- Science
- NDTV
Rise In Greenhouse Gas Release Causing More Extreme Weather, Scientists Warn
Washington: Humans are on track to release so much greenhouse gas in less than three years that a key threshold for limiting global warming will be nearly unavoidable, according to a study to be released Thursday. The report predicts that society will have emitted enough carbon dioxide by early 2028 that crossing an important long-term temperature boundary will be more likely than not. The scientists calculate that by that point there will be enough of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to create a 50-50 chance or greater that the world will be locked in to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times. That level of gas accumulation, which comes from the burning of fuels like gasoline, oil and coal, is sooner than the same group of 60 international scientists calculated in a study last year. "Things aren't just getting worse. They're getting worse faster," said study co-author Zeke Hausfather of the tech firm Stripe and the climate monitoring group Berkeley Earth. "We're actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there's a silver lining. I don't think there really is one in this one." That 1.5 goal, first set in the 2015 Paris agreement, has been a cornerstone of international efforts to curb worsening climate change. Scientists say crossing that limit would mean worse heat waves and droughts, bigger storms and sea-level rise that could imperil small island nations. Over the last 150 years, scientists have established a direct correlation between the release of certain levels of carbon dioxide, along with other greenhouse gases like methane, and specific increases in global temperatures. In Thursday's Indicators of Global Climate Change report, researchers calculated that society can spew only 143 billion more tons (130 billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide before the 1.5 limit becomes technically inevitable. The world is producing 46 billion tons (42 billion metric tons) a year, so that inevitability should hit around February 2028 because the report is measured from the start of this year, the scientists wrote. The world now stands at about 1.24 degrees Celsius (2.23 degrees Fahrenheit) of long-term warming since preindustrial times, the report said. Earth's energy imbalance The report, which was published in the journal Earth System Science Data, shows that the rate of human-caused warming per decade has increased to nearly half a degree (0.27 degrees Celsius) per decade, Hausfather said. And the imbalance between the heat Earth absorbs from the sun and the amount it radiates out to space, a key climate change signal, is accelerating, the report said. "It's quite a depressing picture unfortunately, where if you look across the indicators, we find that records are really being broken everywhere," said lead author Piers Forster, director of the Priestley Centre for Climate Futures at the University of Leeds in England. "I can't conceive of a situation where we can really avoid passing 1.5 degrees of very long-term temperature change." The increase in emissions from fossil-fuel burning is the main driver. But reduced particle pollution, which includes soot and smog, is another factor because those particles had a cooling effect that masked even more warming from appearing, scientists said. Changes in clouds also factor in. That all shows up in Earth's energy imbalance, which is now 25% higher than it was just a decade or so ago, Forster said. Earth's energy imbalance "is the most important measure of the amount of heat being trapped in the system," Hausfather said. Earth keeps absorbing more and more heat than it releases. "It is very clearly accelerating. It's worrisome," he said. Crossing the temperature limit The planet temporarily passed the key 1.5 limit last year. The world hit 1.52 degrees Celsius (2.74 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since preindustrial times for an entire year in 2024, but the Paris threshold is meant to be measured over a longer period, usually considered 20 years. Still, the globe could reach that long-term threshold in the next few years even if individual years haven't consistently hit that mark, because of how the Earth's carbon cycle works. That 1.5 is "a clear limit, a political limit for which countries have decided that beyond which the impact of climate change would be unacceptable to their societies," said study co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate scientist at Imperial College London. The mark is so important because once it is crossed, many small island nations could eventually disappear because of sea level rise, and scientific evidence shows that the impacts become particularly extreme beyond that level, especially hurting poor and vulnerable populations, he said. He added that efforts to curb emissions and the impacts of climate change must continue even if the 1.5 degree threshold is exceeded. Crossing the threshold "means increasingly more frequent and severe climate extremes of the type we are now seeing all too often in the U.S. and around the world - unprecedented heat waves, extreme hot drought, extreme rainfall events, and bigger storms," said University of Michigan environment school dean Jonathan Overpeck, who wasn't part of the study. Andrew Dessler, a Texas A&M University climate scientist who wasn't part of the study, said the 1.5 goal was aspirational and not realistic, so people shouldn't focus on that particular threshold. "Missing it does not mean the end of the world," Dessler said in an email, though he agreed that "each tenth of a degree of warming will bring increasingly worse impacts."
NDTV
a day ago
- Science
- NDTV
World May Exhaust 1.5 Degree Celsius Carbon Budget In 3 Years: Scientists
New Delhi: If the world continues to release carbon dioxide at the current rate, the carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be exhausted in just over three years, according to an international group of scientists. The carbon budget refers to the total amount of carbon dioxide the planet can emit while still having a good chance of staying below a certain temperature threshold. In this case, the limit is 1.5 degrees Celsius, which countries agreed to at the Paris climate conference in 2015. Exceeding the carbon budget does not mean the 1.5-degree limit will be crossed immediately. It means the world is on course to surpass it very soon unless emissions are drastically cut. The latest "Indicators of Global Climate Change" study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, also found that the carbon budget for 2 degrees Celsius could be exceeded by 2048 if current levels of CO2 emissions continue. Scientists said human activities have led to the release of around 53 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2e) into the atmosphere every year over the past decade. This is mainly due to increasing emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. In the last 10 years (2015 to 2024), the Earth's temperature was 1.24 degrees Celsius higher than it was before the industrial era began. Scientists say 1.22 degrees Celsius of this warming was caused by human activities. The year 2024 was the hottest on record and marked the first calendar year with a global average temperature more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1850-1900 baseline, the period before human activities such as fossil fuel use began significantly affecting the climate. A permanent breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius target in the Paris Agreement refers to sustained warming over a 20 to 30-year period. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization said there is a 70 per cent chance that the average global temperature between 2025 and 2029 will exceed pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. In 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, compared to 2019 levels, to keep the temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. However, IPCC Chair Jim Skea told PTI in an interview in March that the 43 per cent reduction target is now outdated due to a lack of action, meaning the actual reduction needed is even higher.
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
a day ago
- Science
- Business Standard
Earth to exhaust carbon budget for 1.5-deg C limit in 3 years: Scientists
If the world continues to release carbon dioxide at the current rate, the carbon budget for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be exhausted in just over three years, according to an international group of scientists. The carbon budget refers to the total amount of carbon dioxide the planet can emit while still having a good chance of staying below a certain temperature threshold. In this case, the limit is 1.5 degrees Celsius, which countries agreed to at the Paris climate conference in 2015. Exceeding the carbon budget does not mean the 1.5-degree limit will be crossed immediately. It means the world is on course to surpass it very soon unless emissions are drastically cut. The latest "Indicators of Global Climate Change" study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, also found that the carbon budget for 2 degrees Celsius could be exceeded by 2048 if current levels of CO2 emissions continue. Scientists said human activities have led to the release of around 53 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Gt CO2e) into the atmosphere every year over the past decade. This is mainly due to increasing emissions from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. In the last 10 years (2015 to 2024), the Earth's temperature was 1.24 degrees Celsius higher than it was before the industrial era began. Scientists say 1.22 degrees Celsius of this warming was caused by human activities. The year 2024 was the hottest on record and marked the first calendar year with a global average temperature more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 18501900 baseline, the period before human activities such as fossil fuel use began significantly affecting the climate. A permanent breach of the 1.5-degree Celsius target in the Paris Agreement refers to sustained warming over a 20 to 30-year period. In 2022, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent by 2030, compared to 2019 levels, to keep the temperature rise within 1.5 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. Last month, the World Meteorological Organization said there is a 70 per cent chance that the average global temperature between 2025 and 2029 will exceed pre-industrial levels by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. However, IPCC Chair Jim Skea told PTI in an interview in March that the 43 per cent reduction target is now outdate due to a lack of action, meaning the actual reduction needed is even higher.
