The climate system will heat well past 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) and perhaps up to 2°C without any further fossil fuel emissions. That’s the conclusion to be drawn from new research which should also help demystify the rhetoric from the 2015 Paris climate talks of keeping warming to below 1.5°C .
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| Our Faustian bargain: the byproduct of burning dirty fossil fuels are short-lived atmospheric aerosols which provide temporary cooling. |
It’s not that 1.5°C isn’t dangerous: in fact, at just 1–1.1°C of warming to date, climate change is already dangerous. A safe climate would be well below the present level of warming, unless you think it is OK to destroy the Arctic ecosystem, tip West West Antarctic glaciers into a self-accelerating melt, and lose the world’s coral reefs, just for starters.
Read the story from Climate Code Red by David Spratt - “Quantifying our Faustian bargain with fossil fuels.”
(Listen to David Spratt on "Climate Conversations")
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