Earth briefly hit the 2 degree warming limit not once, but twice in November. Two degrees since pre-industrial times is the feared warming milestone that would cause ‘cascading effects’ of climate change over time. Increased flooding in Pakistan, forest fires in Canada. What’s it going to take for the world to wake up? This past Friday the globe hit 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above the preindustrial levels of temperature for the first time in recorded history, said Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of Copernicus Climate Change Service. The next day, it broke the threshold again.
Provisional ERA5 global temperature for 17th November from was 1.17°C above 1991 to 2020 – the warmest on record, she said. “Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than 2°C above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels, at 2.06°C.”
She updates: “2.07°C above preindustrial and provisional data for 18th Nov at 2.06°C above preindustrial. Now two Nov 2023 days where global temperature exceeded 2°C in ERA5.”
That’s the exact temperature level the world has wanted to avoid, experts say: “A 2-degree rise in global temperatures is considered a critical threshold above which dangerous and cascading effects of human-generated climate change will occur,” according to NASA.
Indeed, one or even two days above 2 degrees of warming “does not mean that the Paris Agreement has been breached,” Burgess said in an interview with CNN, “but highlights how we are approaching those internationally agreed limits. We can expect to see increasing frequency of 1.5-degree and 2-degree days over the coming months and years.”
Meanwhile Saudi Arabia announces it has discovered more natural gas. We are not going to get out of global warming without a shift in mentality.
