People in many parts of the world – such as this family in Victoria, Australia – are feeling the impact of increasingly severe flooding, an expected consequence of a warming world Gideon Mendel/Corbis via Getty Images
IT IS probably the best deal we can hope for – but it is considerably worse than the one we have now. “It is not going to be fine,” says Dann Mitchell. “We will see significant changes to our lives.”
Mitchell, a climate modeller at the University of Bristol, UK, is talking about a world warmed by 1.5°C – the number agreed at the Paris climate talks in 2015 as the “safe” level of global warming we should aspire to stay below.
The political will to keep to the 1.5°C target has been lacking so far. The latest round of talks, which closed in Katowice, Poland, last month, confirmed the number, but gave no indication of how to stick to it. Meanwhile, the number’s scientific significance has grown, as both the minimum warming we can possibly achieve, and the maximum that we can tolerate without near-certain disaster.
But what does a 1.5°C warmer world really look like? And if we miss the target and end up at 2, 3 or 4°C, what then? The answers are beginning to crystallise. They aren’t pretty – but they do tell us what’s at stake.
When world leaders in Paris unexpectedly announced their intent not just to keep warming below 2°C compared with pre-industrial levels, but also “to pursue efforts to limit the temperature …
