2024: the year we began to breach the Paris Agreement according to two studies

June 2024 marked the milestone of 12 consecutive months in which the planet’s average temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Scientists believe that it is the beginning of a sustained period of warming that would mean a breach of the Paris Agreement.

In 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed in the French capital to try to avoid a rise in the average temperature of the planet of 1.5 degrees: the threshold set by science so that the impacts of climate change are not excessively catastrophic. Today, two studies published in the journal Nature, based on climate models calibrated with observations, agree on the same conclusion: non-compliance with the Paris Agreement may have already begun. One is led by Emanuel Bevacqua of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, and the other by Alex Cannon of the Climate Research Unit Canada. One of the studies suggests that we have already opened the 20-year window in which the average temperature of the planet will not fall below the threshold of 1.5 degrees, and that this trend could only be reversed with extremely drastic measures to reduce emissions. The other concludes that the fact that we have remained above 1.5 degrees of anomaly for 12 consecutive months indicates that it is very likely that we have already exceeded that threshold for at least the next two decades.

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