With COP27 starting, it will be instructive to see what official discourse and communiques have to say about the chance of restricting the post-industrial global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Global temperature rise is now in the 1.0 to 1.3 range. The UK's Met Office and the World Meteorological Organisation say that there is a 48% chance of reaching 1.5 in at least one of the next 5 years – probably before the IPCC publishes its next report. UNEP says that 1.8 is a possible peak, but only if all countries do what they have recently promised. If …
I learn this not from any close scrutiny of those organisations' papers but from a gloomy Economist briefing ahead of the COP. It says that 1.5 might be ultimately possible but only through CO2 removals to bring the temperature down after it has overshot.
Will this realism feature in COP deliberations, I wonder? Or will the public be kept in the dark with more obfuscation?
The Economist article is especially informative when it comes to revealing how the 1.5 figure became so totemic even when it was known that it was likely to be unrealistic. The UK COP26 organisers egged this process on it seems, not wanting to be party poopers in Glasgow. One outcome is that a lot of organisations, especially educational ones, are heavily invested in the idea of 1.5.
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