Global Warming: Study Says 1.5-Degree Temperature Limit Still Possible

The Paris Climate Agreement was put in place to limit temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius, or even better 1.5 degrees, in this century. Previously this has been viewed as a somewhat unrealistic goal that would take drastic climate action to achieve. A new study published in Nature Geoscience Monday says that limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius actually isn't impossible.

While the study says that limiting warming to only 1.5 degrees Celsius is not impossible, it does note that it will require “delivery on strengthened pledges for 2030 followed by challengingly deep and rapid mitigation.” The abstract of the study even states that if emissions peak and and then decline before 2030 and then continue to decline the warming would range within 1.2 and 2 degrees Celsius.

To come to this conclusion the researchers who worked on the study, from several universities working through an Oxford University partnership, reevaluated the carbon budget that would allow for just 1.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century. A carbon budget essentially means the amount of carbon that could be released into the atmosphere while still keeping to just 1.5 degrees of warming.

To conduct this assessment of the carbon budget the researchers used current Earth System Models, new experiments and evaluated the impacts of current ranges of uncertainty in models. What they found was that estimates of historical warming tend to overestimate while underestimating carbon dioxide emissions.

The lead author on the study, Richard Millar, believes that limiting the total CO2 emissions from 2015 to less than 240 billion tons of carbon would achieve the goal of keeping warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to a press release.

The study has sparked some climate change skeptics to say that climate change isn’t an actual threat. But closer reading of the study shows that the researchers involved believe that the 1.5 degrees of warming is only achievable if even more ambitious emission reductions are made than what have already been pledged.

There are 160 countries that have committed to reducing emissions to reach the minimum goal of 2 degrees of warming with 1.5 degrees of warming as a reach goal. The Paris Climate Agreement has no legal ramifications for countries that don’t meet the emission goals but instead says that meeting the goals are in the best interest of the governments involved.

President Donald Trump decided earlier this year however to withdraw the United States from the agreement regardless of whether or not it’s binding. After he announced his decision to withdraw the country, a process that could take years, government officials on the local level, as well as companies and universities declared that even if the United States would not be participating in the agreement on a federal level, they would continue to work to reduce emissions anyway.