Global heating threshold at risk, climate leader warns

 

The possibility of keeping global heating under a key 1.5-degree-Celsius threshold may be under threat, a global climate leader warned on Monday.

“We’ll either leave Egypt having kept 1.5 [degrees] alive or this will be the COP where we lose 1.5,” British climate adviser Alok Sharma said at the United Nations climate change conference (COP27).

Sharma, who presided over COP26 in Glasgow last year, told world leaders in Egypt on Monday that limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) had to be a “red line.”

The 1.5-degree-Celsius warming limit is a bar that countries said they hoped to stay below at the 2015 U.N. climate summit in Paris. At the time, they pledged to adhere to a 2-degree-Celsius, or 3.6-degree Fahrenheit, warming limit.

A recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy concluded that insufficient government action has put that 1.5-degree threshold out of reach...MORE.