The world can’t seem to agree on when the planet will exceed a key temperature threshold in the Paris climate agreement.
Nearly 200 nations committed back in 2015 to pursuing efforts to keep global temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. But there is no official metric for determining when the world has crossed that line into increasingly catastrophic impacts.
Enter an international team of scientific experts.
The World Meteorological Organization first convened the team of around 10 experts last summer to look at the different methodologies and devise a more accurate way to measure current warming. Some of their preliminary findings are detailed in the WMO’s latest State of Climate report, which estimates that current global warming is somewhere between 1.34 degrees and 1.41 degrees compared with the 1850-1900 average.
