Joint Seminar: Quo Vadis, 1,5-Degree Goal?

2024 was the first in many thousand years with a global surface temperature exceeding that of the pre-industrial period by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.  My presentation uses this turning point to first analyze the temperatures of the past years in the context of anthropogenic climate change.  There is no evidence that the temperature increase has now gone completely out of control, but the world moves almost inexorably toward a global warming of permanently more than 1.5 degrees.  This would mean that a crucial goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement would be missed.  And it is not realistic to expect that global warming can be reduced back to less than 1.5 degrees later during the 21st century.  This is the clear result of recent combined social-science and climate-physics research.  On the other hand, international climate policy still proclaims the 1.5-degree goal, at least in its rhetoric – as does the climate movement.  Science thus faces a communication dilemma.  1.5 degrees as a political goal appears immutable, and scientific doubt of its realizability risks sidelining science in the public disourse.  One way out of this dilemma would maintain 1.5 degrees as an ideal goal but would augment this with the goal – also stipulated in the Paris Agreement – to obtain greenhouse-gas neutrality in the second half of the 21st century.

Datum

12.02.2025

Uhrzeit

13:30 h

Ort

Bundesstr. 53, room 022/023
Seminar Room 022/023, Ground Floor, Bundesstrasse 53, 20146 Hamburg, Hamburg

Chair

Ulrike Niemeier
Divya Sri Praturi

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