James Hansen, the former Nasa scientist has said that the internationally agreed threshold to prevent the Earth from spiraling into a new superheated era will be “passed for all practical purposes” during 2024.
Hansen, who is credited for alerting the world to the dangers of climate change in the 1980s, said that global heating caused by the burning of fossil fuels, amplified by the naturally reoccurring El Niño climatic event, will by May push temperatures to as much as 1.7C (3F) above the average experienced before industrialization.
Measured over the 12-month period to May, the high temperature will not by itself break the commitment made by the world’s governments to limit global heating to 1.5C (2.7F) above the time before the dominance of coal, oil and gas. Scientists say the 1.5C ceiling cannot be considered breached until a string of several years exceed this limit, with this moment considered most likely to happen at some point in the 2030s.
But Hansen said that even after the waning of El Niño, which typically drives up average global heat, the span of subsequent years will, taken together, still average at the 1.5C limit. The heating of the world from greenhouse gas emissions is being reinforced by knock-on impacts, Hansen said, such as the melting of the planet’s ice, which is making the surface darker and therefore absorbing even more sunlight.
“We are now in the process of moving into the 1.5C world,” Hansen told the Guardian. “You can bet $100 to a donut on this and be sure of getting a free donut, if you can find a sucker willing to take the bet.”
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In a bulletin issued with two other climate researchers, Hansen stated that “the 1.5C global warming ceiling has been passed for all practical purposes because the large planetary energy imbalance assures that global temperature is heading still higher”. Hansen has promoted a view, disputed by some other climate scientists, that the rate of global heating is accelerating due to a widening gap between the amount of energy being absorbed by the Earth from the sun and the amount returning to space.
Hansen, who is renowned for his role in publicly revealing the onset of the greenhouse effect to the US Congress in 1988, added that the looming loss of the 1.5C guardrail should provide a jolt the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the foremost body of climate science that has charted pathways to avoid breaching the target.
“Passing through the 1.5C world is a significant milestone because it shows that the story being told by the United Nations, with the acquiescence of its scientific advisory body, the IPCC, is a load of bullshit,” Hansen said.
“We are not moving into a 1.5C world, we are briefly passing through it in 2024. We will pass through the 2C (3.6F) world in the 2030s unless we take purposeful actions to affect the planet’s energy balance.”
Last year was reported to be the hottest ever recorded, scientific agencies in the US and the European Union are expected to confirm this week, with the global temperature for 2023 close to being 1.5C above the pre-industrial era. El Niño, which heats up sections of the Pacific Ocean and normally adds to the overall global temperature, is anticipated to be even stronger this year than last, before fading away.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
