The world may be on track to breach 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming in about three years, a group of scientists warned in a new paper.
Researchers have called for keeping the planet’s warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
An update on the state of global warming published this week says that if 2024 levels of planet-warming emissions continue, there’s a 50 percent chance the world will warm to 1.5 degrees in a little more than three years.
Researchers note this estimate is “not expected to correspond exactly to the time that 1.5 °C global warming level is reached” due to a few uncertainties.
However, the finding paints a stark picture to how close the world is to passing that threshold.
The 1.5 degree figure is partly a political one — the difference between 1.49 degrees and 1.51 degrees, for example, is not expected to necessarily be the difference between survival and doom.
However, there are certain “tipping points” after which climate damage becomes irreversible — like the melting of the Greenland ice sheet or the collapse of ocean current systems.
The paper says that currently, the world is estimated to have warmed 1.36 degrees Celsius (2.45 degrees Fahrenheit) and is currently warming at a rate of about 0.27 degrees Celsius (0.49 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade.
These warming levels represent an average level of warming of the Earth’s temperature since preindustrial times. The amount of warming in any given place — or the temperature change experienced by humans — may be different.
The report, authored by dozens of scientists, is part of an initiative called the Indicators of Global Climate Change which seeks to fill the gap of climate information in the years between official United Nations climate reports.
