A new study has claimed that we may breach the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) climate change increase threshold by the late 2020s — almost two decades earlier than current projections.
The study, published Feb. 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change, claims global surface temperatures had increased by 1.7 C (3 F) above pre-industrial averages by the year 2020.
However, other scientists have questioned the findings, saying that there are flaws in the work.
Global warming of 2 C is considered an important threshold — warming beyond this greatly increases the likelihood of devastating and irreversible climate breakdown. Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries pledged to limit global temperature rises to ideally 1.5C and safely below 2C.
“The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate change has been brought forward by at least a decade,” lead author Malcolm McCulloch, a coral reef expert at The University of Western Australia, said at a news conference on Thursday (Feb. 1). “This is a major change to the thinking about global warming.”
A major issue in climate science is where to set the pre-industrial baseline, before fossil fuel burning kickstarted warming. Until the 20th century, ocean temperatures records were a sporadic and non-standardized patchwork of millions of observations collected by sailors to chart courses through seas.
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To weed out erroneous past recordings, climate scientists have previously turned to natural records of temperature stored in ocean animals such as coral, in ice and sediment cores or inside tree grains.
However, scientists still have no consensus on the amount of post-industrial warming. A recent analysis using the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2023 dataset suggested Earth had warmed by 1.34 C (2.4 F) above the 1850 to 1900 average, while data from the U.K. Met Office placed it at 1.54 C (2.7 F).
Sponge for knowledge
To search for a better record of 19th-century temperatures, the researchers behind the new study looked at a sponge species called Ceratoporella nicholsoni in the Caribbean Sea. Known for their rock-hard…
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