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Global Warming Could Exceed 1.5C Within Five Years, Report Says (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global warming could temporarily hit 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time between now and 2023, according to a long-term forecast by the Met Office. Meteorologists said there was a 10% chance of a year in which the average temperature rise exceeds 1.5C, which is the lowest of the two Paris agreement targets set for the end of the century. Until now, the hottest year on record was 2016, when the planet warmed 1.11C above pre-industrial levels, but the long-term trend is upward. In the five-year forecast released on Wednesday, the Met Office highlights the first possibility of a natural El Niño combining with global warming to exceed the 1.5C mark. Climatologists stressed this did not mean the world had broken the Paris agreement 80 years ahead of schedule because international temperature targets are based on 30-year averages. Although it would be an outlier, scientists said the first appearance in their long-term forecasts of such a "temporary excursion" was worrying, particularly for regions that are usually hard hit by extreme weather related to El Nino. This includes western Australia, South America, south and west Africa, and the Indian monsoon belt.

5 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. No AI winter for meteorologists by AHuxley · · Score: 4, Funny

    Gets hot? Global warming as predicted.
    Gets cold? Climate change as predicted.

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  2. Average temperatures can be misleading by rossdee · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you ask people around here if they are worried about a 2 to 3 degree F temperature increase, they would say they'd welcome it, especially at this time of year.
    Last week it hit -35F (actual temperature, not wind chill)

    Of course ots not as simple as that, climate change means preciptation patterns change and extreme weather events (floods, droughts and storms) become more common.

    In recorded and prerecorded history the climate/weather problem that has killed the most people is drought.

  3. Re: What if... by reanjr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Anyone buying waterfront property is betting against most common models of climate change.

  4. Re: What if... by vyvepe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Statistics is not a science. It is not even math.

    Statistics definitely is a branch of math. You are ridiculous. You made me respond even when I do not care much about climate change. But both sides sometimes can spit such a bullshit when talking about it. One side ignores models completely because they are sometimes wrong. The other side misleads about how expensive renewables are.

  5. Re:What if... by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You could have at least read as far as the second sentence in the summary. They said there is a 10% chance of one year being over the 1.5C line.

    And if you dig only slightly further, you can see that their model provides probabilities for a number of scenarios. That's how climate modelling works, and why denier claims that "all models are wrong" are simply nonsense.

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