World warming at record 0.2C per decade, scientists warn
#PARIS: Record-high greenhouse gas emissions and diminishing air pollution have caused an unparalleled acceleration in global warming, 50 top scientists warned on Thursday in a sweeping climate science update. From 2013 to 2022, “human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade,” they reported in a peer-reviewed study aimed at policymakers.
Average annual emissions over the same period hit an all-time high of 54 billion tonnes of CO2 or its equivalent in other gases — about 1,700 tonnes every second. World leaders will be confronted with the new data at the critical #COP28 climate summit later this year in Dubai, where a “Global Stocktake” at the UN talks will assess progress toward the 2015 Paris Agreement´s #temperature goals.
The findings would appear to close the door on capping global warming under the Paris treaty´s more ambitious 1.5C target, long identified as a guard rail for a relatively climate-safe world, albeit one still roiled by severe impacts.
“Even though we are not yet at 1.5C warming, the #carbon #budget” — the amount of #greenhouse gases humanity can emit without exceeding that limit — “will likely be exhausted in only a few years,” said lead author Piers
Forster, a physics professor at the #University of Leeds. That budget has shrunk by half since the UN´s climate science advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on #ClimateChange (IPCC), gathered data for its most recent benchmark report in 2021, according to the #Forster and colleagues, many of whom were core #IPCC contributors.
