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There is a 10% chance there could be a year in which the average temperature rise exceeds 1.5 degrees. This sentence is key: "Climatologists stressed this did

There is a 10% chance there could be a year in which the average temperature rise exceeds 1.5 degrees. This sentence is key: "Climatologists stressed this did not mean the world had broken the Paris agreement 80 years ahead of schedule because international temperature targets are based on 30-year averages." The title is misleading.

throwaway5752 8y ago
That's more of a policy thing than a temperature thing. Nature will care about the current year (yes - perhaps even further on longer term trends like aquifer depletion and ice cap melting), not the trailing 30 year average. To highlight the distinction, we could have a 10 deg C increase next year. That would end life as we know it, but would only move the trailing 30 year average .3 deg C. Also from the article "The recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on warming of 1.5C, highlighted the calamitous difference even a fraction of a degree above could make to coral reefs, Arctic ecosystems and hundreds of millions of lives. Starting now, the report said emissions would have to be cut by 45% by 2030 to have any chance of holding to that level." tl;dr - the headline is 100% accurate and appropriate.