Planet to breach heating threshold sooner than projected: IPCC

Dhaka (Dec 28, 2020): The planet will breach the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to the latest estimate of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The world will heat up more than it was earlier anticipated, between 2027 and 2042, it said.

The IPCC uses the General Circulation Models (GCM) to express wide ranges in overall temperature projections. This makes it difficult to circle outcomes in different climate mitigation scenarios. For example, an IPCC model would predict a temperature increase of a massive range — between 1.9 degree Celsius and 4.5 degree Celsius — if carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is doubled.

“Our approach allows climate sensitivity and its uncertainty to be estimated from direct observations with few assumptions,” said co-author Raphaël Hébert, a former graduate researcher at McGill University.

“Climate skeptics have argued that global warming projections are unreliable because they depend on faulty supercomputer models. While these criticisms are unwarranted, they underscore the need for independent and different approaches to predicting future warming,” said co-author Bruno Tremblay, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University.

Shaun Lovejoy, professor in the Physics Department at McGill University said world leaders must stop claiming that their government’s weak policies could avert climate change.