By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Just as four big oil and gas producers block the UN climate policymaking conference in Katowice, Poland from welcoming a report on the science of the 1.5 degree Celsius (°C) target which it had commissioned three years earlier in Paris, new evidence has emerged of the striking contradiction between word and deed at COP24.
By Kevin Anderson, Manchester Policy Blogs
The IPCC report meticulously lays out how the serious climate impacts of 1.5°C of warming are still far less destructive than those for 2°C. Sadly, the IPCC then fails, again, to address the profound implications of reducing emissions in line with both 1.5 and 2°C. Dress it up however we may wish, climate change is ultimately a rationing issue.
By Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
Despite the Trump administration's own prediction that by the end of this century, the world could warm "a disastrous" 7°F, or about 4°C, above pre-industrial levels, the president has decided not to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but instead to use the devastating findings to justify and intensify his pro-fossil fuel agenda.
By Richard Heinberg, David Fridley, Resilience.org
In our view, at some point scientists and policy makers must begin discussing the one scenario that world leaders seem to want to avoid at all costs, i.e., managed economic contraction. The irony is that this scenario could reliably cut greenhouse gas emissions and is achievable without appeal to magic (CCS or decoupling).
By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show
In this tenth part of our series on climate science, we explore a new paper outlining a climate scenario that would limit warming to 1.5 °C without relying on negative emission technologies.
By Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
The warming experienced by people is typically higher than the global average warming. In a world where warming is limited to “well below” 2C about 14% of the population will still experience warming exceeding 2C.
By Daisy Dunne, Carbon Brief
The research suggests that improving energy efficiency – chiefly by saving on everyday energy use – could play a major role in restricting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which is the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement.
By Andrew King, Luke Harrington, Carbon Brief
In our study, we examine the consequences of missing the 1.5C limit in terms of the change people experience in their local climate. We do this using the “signal-to-noise” ratio.
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
So how does hitting warming of 1.5°C a decade from now square with the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C”? In two words, it doesn’t.
By Daisy Dunne, Carbon Brief
Meeting the Paris Agreement’s aspirational target of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels could “substantially” reduce the risk of sea ice-free summers in the Arctic, research shows. Two new studies find that, under 1.5C of warming, Arctic waters could experience ice-free summers around 2.5% of the time, or one in every 40 years.