This story was originally published by The Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The internationally agreed threshold to prevent the Earth from spiralling into a new superheated era will be “passed for all practical purposes” during 2024, the man known as the godfather of climate science has warned.
Countries around the world, including Canada, are officially under pressure to further ratchet up their commitments under the Paris Agreement, the UN’s climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told delegates at the annual climate negotiations in Dubai.
The latest grim findings from climate scientists estimate that based on current trajectories, the planet has roughly six years before blowing past the Paris Agreement’s goal to hold global warming to 1.5 C, Stiell said during the COP28 opening ceremony.
U.S. oil and gas companies extracted record amounts of planet-warming oil and gas in 2023 — a year that was the globe’s hottest in recorded history.
New reporting from The Guardian on Monday found that the U.S. government is planning for oil and gas production levels to stay at “near-record levels” until mid-century.
The world is on track to reach nearly 3 degrees Celsius of warming this century, double the United Nations’s threshold, even if developed nations meet their current emissions pledges, according to a report the U.N. issued Monday.
The US is warming faster than the global average and its people are suffering “far-reaching and worsening” consequences from the climate crisis, with worse to come, according to an authoritative report issued by the US government.
While environmentalists are preparing for the COP28 climate summit in Dubai later this month, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is also meeting to discuss its next assessments of the state of global warming.
After a record-shattering summer — with 2023 on pace to become the hottest year in recorded human history — one of the key decisions for the IPCC is whether to emphasize the prospect of runaway, irreversible global warming by issuing a special report on climate tipping points.
