Humans must limit global warming to 1.5 ℃ to avoid runaway ice melting, according to new research by an international group of climate scientists.
The new study is the latest and most comprehensive evidence indicating that countries must pass policies to meet the temperature targets set by the 2015 Paris agreement, if humans hope to avoid potentially catastrophic sea level rise and other worldwide harms.
Those targets—to limit global warming to between 1.5 and 2 ℃ compared to preindustrial times—are within reach if countries follow through on their current promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But it’s still unclear if governments and corporations will cut emissions as quickly as they have promised.
The new study makes it clear that every tenth of a degree of warming that is avoided will have huge, long-term benefits. For example, the enormous ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are already melting rapidly, adding enormous amounts of fresh water to the ocean and driving global sea level rise. But there is a point after which that melting becomes unavoidable, even if humans rein in(控制) global warming entirely. The new study estimates that, for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, that point falls somewhere around 1.5 ℃ of warming. The hotter the Earth gets, the more likely it is to cause runaway ice loss. But keeping average global temperatures from rising less than 1.5 ℃ reduces the risk of such loss.
If both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melted, it would lead to more than 30 feet of sea level rise, scientists estimate, although that would happen relatively slowly, over the course of at least 500 years.
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