World's Climate Scientists; Global Heating to Blast Past Stabilization Target

Paris Climate Agreement; a global milestone of modern times

Global scientific and policy experts representing the world’s governments agreed to limit GHG emissions (Greenhouse Gases) responsible for Earth’s rising temperature. The agreement set forth a survival plan for humans and the Earth’s ecosystems on which all humans (rish and poor alike) are dependent.

The Paris climate agreement further set forth an emissions abatement plan established to limit global temperature averages to no greater than 1.5C deemed needed to avoid the most disastrous climate outcomes projected due to human-generated temperature rise. The agreement further established that in order to limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before next year (2025) at the latest, and thereafter decline 43% by 2030 — but that was 2015… Nine years later some clean energy progress has been made in both the electrification of ground transportation and grid clean energy sectors. Overall, however, little global climate accountability has been executed that is needed to correct a rapidly growing climate crisis.

The 1.5C temperature threshold was fully qualified and chosen to prevent the worst of the climate crisis. Since 2016 it has served as the baseline for international climate negotiations. Current climate findings show the world is on track for a 2.7C temperature rise within this century.

Few IPCC experts expect the world to deliver the huge action required to reduce that. The planet and humans are now in real and consequential trouble. The IPCC’s reports are the gold standard assessments of climate change, approved by all governments and produced by experts in physical and social sciences. The results show that many of the most knowledgeable people on the planet expect climate havoc to unfold in the coming decades.

Overall, the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet.

“I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years,” said Gretta Pecl, at the University of Tasmania. “[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future.”
Peter Cox, at the University of Exeter, UK, said: “Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5C – it already is. And it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2C, which we might well do.”
The climate crisis is already causing profound damage to lives and livelihoods across the world, with only 1.2C (2.16F) of global heating on average over the past four years. Jesse Keenan, at Tulane University in the US, said: “This is just the beginning: buckle up.”

Most of the scientific community acknowledges the link between current and developing climate-driven events, and many increasingly envisions a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.

The specific social impacts on Hawaii’s residents are unknown. It is easy to project that increasing global climate impacts (due to unprecedented warming of the planet) are already producing ecological, economic, and social damages within the state. The 2023 Maui fire and the present day coral bleaching events now impacting the Pacific region are but two recent examples.
The largest ever recorded leap in the amount of carbon dioxide laden in the world’s atmosphere has just occurred, according to researchers who monitor the relentless accumulation of the primary gas that is heating the planet.
The global average concentration of carbon dioxide in March this year was 4.7 parts per million (or ppm) higher than it it was in March last year, which is a record-breaking increase in CO₂ levels over a 12-month period.
The increase has been spurred, scientists say, by the periodic El Niño climate event, which has now waned, as well as the ongoing and increasing amounts of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

2023 IPCC Climate Survey Findings:

The 12 noted cause & effect climate events are deemed virtually impossible without humanity’s destabilization of the climate, including;

Intense heatwaves in North America, Europe and Japan, soaring temperatures in Siberia and sweltering seas off Australia.
Seventy-one percent (71%) of the 500 extreme weather events and trends in the database were found to have been made more likely or more severe by human-caused climate change, including 93% of heatwaves, 68% of droughts and 56% of floods or heavy rain.
One in three deaths caused by summer heat over the last three decades was the direct result of human-caused global heating, implying a toll of millions.
Huge financial costs are also now attributable to human influence on the climate, such as $67bn of damages when Hurricane Harvey smashed into Texas and Louisiana in 2017, which was 75% of the total damages from the storm, and the overall financial disruption of global P&C insurance markets.
Global heating has been hurting us for far longer than commonly assumed, with traces of its influence as far back as the heatwaves and droughts that triggered the infamous Dust Bowl in the US in the mid-1930s.

Tenth consecutive monthly heat record alarms climate scientists

Another month, another global heat record that has left climate scientists scratching their heads and hoping this is an El Niño-related hangover rather than a symptom of worse-than-expected planetary health.

Global surface temperatures in March were 0.1C higher than the previous record for the month, set in 2016, and 1.68C higher than the pre-industrial average, according to data released on Tuesday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. This is the 10th consecutive monthly record in a warming phase that has shattered all previous records. Over the past 12 months, average global temperatures have been 1.58C above pre-industrial levels.

Gavin Schmidt, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted that temperature records are being broken each month by up to 0.2C. “It’s humbling, and a bit worrying, to admit that no year has confounded climate scientists’ predictive capabilities more than 2023 has.”

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, one of the vice-chairs of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), noted the planet has been warming at a pace of 0.3C per decade over the past 15 years, almost double the 0.18C per decade trend since the 1970s. “Is this within the range of climate variability or signal of accelerated warming? My concern it is too late if we just wait to see.”

The core problem – fossil fuel emissions – is well known and largely uncontested in the scientific community. A survey of nearly 90,000 climate-related studies shows a 99.9% consensus that humans are altering the climate by burning gas, oil, coal, trees, and trash.

Michael E Mann, the scientist whose 1999 “hockey-stick graph” showed the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial age, said the current trends were to be expected given the continuing rise in emissions. But he said that should not be a source of comfort. “The world is warming AS FAST as we predicted – and that’s bad enough,” he tweeted.

Opposition to the overwhelming scientific findings comes not from science, but the fossil fuel industry – in particular the 57 companies linked to 80% of emissions – which stands to lose trillions of dollars. Last month, Saudi Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser was applauded at an oil industry conference in Houston for declaring: “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.” This was despite the fact that his country and others had agreed just four months earlier to move away from fossil fuels at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai.