Recent scientific studies have shown that last year the Paris Agreement began to be violated. To begin with, June 2024 marked the milestone of one year in a row where the planet’s temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
Scientists believe it is the beginning of a sustained warming period that would imply not meeting the treaty’s goals.
In 2015, close to 200 countries agreed in the French capital on the main goal of trying to prevent the rise of Earth’s average temperature above that mark.
This is the threshold set by science for the impacts of climate change not to be excessively catastrophic.
Is the Paris Agreement being violated? What do the studies say?
What the Paris Agreement says.
Now, two studies published in Nature, based on climate models calibrated with observations, agree on the same conclusion: the Paris Agreement violation may have already begun.
One of them is led by Emanuele Bevacqua, from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany. The other, by Alex Cannon, from the Canadian Centre for Climate Research.
One of the researches suggests that the 20-year window has already opened in which the average temperature of the planet will not drop below the 1.5-degree threshold. It also states that this trend could only be reversed with extremely drastic emission reduction measures.
The other concludes that having remained 12 consecutive months in anomaly indicates that it is very likely that this threshold has already been exceeded for at least the next two decades.
“It is an indication that a long-term warming period has already started (for a period of at least 20 years),” says one of the two authors, Alex Cannon. “The violation of the Paris Agreement is almost certain,” he emphasizes.
Not all is lost
However, despite the context, the conclusions of this study are “not a reason to throw in the towel,” says Pep Canadell, chief researcher at the CSIRO Climate Science Centre in Australia.
On the contrary, he suggests that it is an opportunity to “sharpen climate and energy policies that will lead us to a decarbonized world.”
In statements collected by the Science Media Center, the scientist did not show himself to be 100% pessimistic. “Climate change is like a slippery slope with no bottom, so there is no limit to the damage it can do to our economy, health, and the environment. What we want is to apply the brakes as hard as we can so that the impacts do not grow larger,” Canadell adds.
UN’s call: drastic emission reduction
The Paris Agreement violation.
The United Nations (UN) urged governments to “drastically” reduce emissions by 2025 after a decade of “deadly heat,” with the last ten years being the hottest in history.
This call came with the New Year, pointing out the urgency of a radical change in environmental policies.
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