UN report on 'mission impossible' climate target is scarier than your inner demons
An executive summary of the UN special report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will be vetted in South Korea this week, line-by-line, by diplomats under the 195-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The difference that half-a-degree has made When the 195 nations who endorsed the 2015 Paris Agreement said the world should 'pursue efforts' to cap warming at 1.5C, scientists were caught off-guard. Most scientific literature assumed a target of 2C -- long considered the temperature guardrail for a climate-safe world Hundreds of peer-reviewed studies since then reveal what a difference a half-degree can make "Climate impacts are exponentially more dramatic when we go from 1.5C to 2C," said Henri Waisman, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, and a coordinating author of the report. Ocean levels Most worrying of all, perhaps, are temperature thresholds between 1.5C and 2C that could push Arctic sea ice, methane-laden permafrost, and melting polar ice sheets with enough frozen water to lift oceans by a dozen metres, past a point of no return. Temperature thresholds between 1.5C and 2C could push melting polar ice sheets with enough frozen water to lift oceans by a dozen metres.
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