Nearing 1.5 Degrees

A report from the United Nations, the World Meteorological Organization, and other groups finds an increasing probability of global mean temperature exceeding the 1.5 degree Celcius increase limit proposed in the Paris agreement.

[I]n the five-year period 2020–2024, the annual mean global near surface temperature is predicted to be between 0.91 °C and 1.59 °C above pre-industrial conditions (taken as the average over the period 1850 to 1900). The chance of at least one year exceeding 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels is 24%, with a very small chance (3%) of the five-year mean exceeding this level.

Just two years ago the expectation of exceeding 1.5 degrees was sometime between 2030 and 2052.

And Elizabeth Weil writes about this past Labor Day.

This was the weekend that climate change, in California, stopped being about the future. The weekend that the idea that COVID-19 was worse than climate change, or fascism was worse than climate change, disappeared.