Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr
UN climate envoys, who may have failed to keep the 1.5C target alive for now, are now on a desperate mission to try save it.
Language switches from “keeping 1.5C alive” to keeping 1.5C “within reach”: note one can reach downwards once temperatures rise above 1.5C — which they are on track to do this year — as well as upwards.
The other switch in the language is … phrasing that 1.5C isn’t breached unless it is breached for more than one year. Cmon – do envoys seriously think people of the world will buy this line?
For the calendar year to date, January to November, the global mean temperature for 2023 is the highest on record, 1.46°C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average, and 0.13°C higher than the eleven-month average for 2016, currently the warmest calendar year on record: Copernicus data.
“The month as a whole [November] was about 1.75°C warmer than an estimate of the November average for 1850-1900, the designated pre-industrial reference period,” it said.
See paragraph 191 from the “First Global Stocktake” document from COP28 published Wednesday — see below:
The launch of “Roadmap to Mission 1.5”
(Updates with Copernicus data)