New Delhi: If climate change and global warming are not already hurting us enough, wait till you hear this.
In a grim reminder and warning to policymakers across the world, 50 top scientists have said that the world is getting warmer at 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade.
From 2013 to 2022, “human-induced warming has been increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade,” the scientists reported in a peer-reviewed study.
“Even though we are not yet at 1.5C warming, the carbon budget will likely be exhausted in only a few years,” AFP quoted lead author Piers Forster, a physics professor at University of Leeds, as saying.
Since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gathered data for its 2021 benchmark report, that budget has shrunk by half, according to Forster and colleagues, many of whom were core IPCC contributors.
The IPCC report had warned that planet Earth is on the brink of irreversible damage to the climate.
To remain under the warming limit set in Paris, the world has to cut 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, compared with 2019, as per the IPCC report.
The new data will be confronted by world leaders at the COP28 climate summit in November-December at Dubai, where a ‘Global Stocktake’ will assess progress towards the 2015 Paris Agreement’s temperature goals.
Human activity has been identified as the key driver of the rising temperatures across the world.
Emissions of greenhouse gases have caused global warming, with the global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.
