6 1.5 or 2 degrees? Who cares?
We all should. According to climate change scientists, there is an incredibly significant difference between the consequences of staying below 1.5 degrees and going towards 2 degrees. The IPCC found that climate change risks rapidly escalate with every additional degree of warming above the 1.5 limit.
Below you can scroll through a comprehensive comparison of the 1.5 C and the 2 C (and beyond) scenarios created by Carbon Brief:
Embedded website: Carbon brief: The impacts of climate change at 1.5C, 2C and beyond. (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)9
A German newspaper also created this detailed visualization, showing where the earth will become uninhabitable under scenarios of global warming between 2.5°C and 3°C by 2100 compared to pre-industrial levels. Such scenarios would be in line with predictions from the Climate Action Tracker, which monitors international climate policy and action.
Now that you know about the consequences of different global warming scenarios, which carbon budget would you select?
Make your choice: With this app you can select the global carbon budget.
Don’t forget: averages discard information.
Knowing about the global temperature rise and the question of 1.5 vs 2 degrees (or more) is important, because it gives us an easy measure by which we can assess our climate ambitions and the state of play of global warming. However, more important than looking at the global temperature rise and its global consequences is the development at the regional and local level.
For many parts of the world, even a 1.5 degree global average temperature rise will have devastating consequences. This is bad enough. And as we know since at least the pandemic, in a deeply connected world, seemingly local effects can easily spillover into other regions or the world as a whole.
Before we move on to country-level carbon budgets, we should reflect on our interpretation of the global carbon budget with regard to the achievability of preventing catastrophic climate change. This is done in the next section.