It’s official: 2023 was the hottest year on record, according to the planet’s top five meteorological organizations, with the global average temperature coming in at just a hair under 1.5°C (2.7°F) above the pre-industrial average, beating the previous record holders of 2016 and 2020 by a wide margin. This developmentread more
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a dire warning that our current efforts at addressing the problem of climate change are not keeping pace with the increase of the rate of global warming, and that we need to act quickly if we are to avoid evoking the more immediate catastrophes that come with allowing the planet’s climate to rise past 1.5ºC (2.7ºF) above the pre-industrial average. This warning comes with the admission that we can indeed meet this seemingly impossible goal, but it comes at a cost: the human community needs to cut its carbon emissions by nearly half in the next 12 years.
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The Central American country of Nicaragua and war-torn Syria have joined the rest of the world’s nations in agreeing to sign onto the Paris climate accord, as the world’s nations meet in Bohn, Germany, for the world’s largest climate summit. These two new inclusions to the accord leave the United States as the sole hold-out on the agreement, after President Donald J. Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the accord last June.
President Daniel Ortega announced that Nicaragua would join the deal on September 20: "We have to be in solidarity with this large number of countries that are the first victims, who are already the victims and are the ones who will continue to suffer the impact of these disasters."
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A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience has found that the goal of the Paris climate accord of keeping global warming levels below 2ºC (3.6ºF) may be easier to achieve than originally anticipated, allowing humanity a much larger carbon budget to work with. One of the major reasons certain parties have rejected the Paris Accord was the perceived difficulty in attaining that goal, but this new finding, if correct, should help encourage more action in regards to what we need to do to curtail global warming.
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