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A new paper by a team of scientists, including from NASA and Columbia University, shows that the world could reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) warming threshold this decade. This comes as another report showed that cleaning the skies, while bringing health benefits and saving lives, accelerates climate change.
Most emissions scenarios under the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) envision the world breaching 1.5C during the 2030s. The world already has warmed by nearly 1.2C (2.2F) above pre-industrial temperatures.
“The 1.5C limit is deader than a doornail,” said the Oxford study co-author James Hansen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute who was among the first scientists to alert the world in the 1980s to the climate-warming impact of greenhouse gasses, “global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050”, the report concluded.
Another unpalatable conclusion was reached by six leading climate experts poring over the results of China’s decade-long and highly effective “war on pollution”. The scientists said air pollution, a global scourge that kills millions of people a year, is shielding us from the full force of the sun. Getting rid of it will accelerate climate change.
The drive to banish pollution, caused mainly by sulfur dioxide (SO2) spewed from coal plants, has cut SO2 emissions by close to 90% and saved hundreds of thousands of lives, Chinese official data and health studies show.
Yet stripped of its toxic shield, which scatters and reflects solar radiation, China’s average temperatures have gone up by 0.7 degrees Celsius since 2014, triggering fiercer heatwaves, according to a Reuters review of meteorological data and the scientists interviewed.
“It’s this Catch-22,” said Patricia Quinn, an atmospheric chemist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), speaking about cleaning up sulfur pollution globally. “We want to clean up our air for air quality purposes, but by doing that, we’re increasing warming.”
