Response to new papers on 1.5°C
"To me, neither of these papers suggests we have reached 1.5°C," Bill Hare comments on two papers published today in Nature Climate Change calculating how close we are to the longer-term Paris Agreement limit.
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Bill Hare, CEO and Senior Scientist at Climate Analytics, comments on upcoming papers on 1.5°C embargoed in Nature Climate Change:
"To me, neither of these papers suggests we have reached 1.5°C.
The Bevacqua paper gets to the question of: we’ve just had a year above 1.5°C, how close are we to the longer-term Paris Agreement limit? And the answer is we are very close to breaching that limit, unless we change course and rapidly reduce emissions which the paper shows would substantially reduce the likelihood of crossing 1.5°C.
"The second paper shows something more worrying: that normally you’d expect to see 12 consecutive months at or above 1.5°C only after you have come a lot closer to crossing the 20-year average Paris target. So it’s possible we are seeing this 12 month record in the opposite order to which we should. And that means either our models aren't describing the climate system well enough: for example do not have all of the most recent changes in greenhouse gases and aerosols included. Or - the big elephant in the room is whether or not there are positive feedbacks going on - where climate change is beginning to induce more climate change. Neither paper speaks to this as a conclusion, but it is a worry.
"The real takeaway from all of this is that we are dangerously close to reaching the Paris 1.5°C limit but if we act together and reduce emissions rapidly then we will begin to reduce the risk of crossing it."
