1.5 Degree Goal: The World Is Running Out of Time

The TAZ Climate Clock has been changed and the world now has less than three years to keep the temperature at 1.5 degrees. We must act to protect our climate.

Time is running out: On September 8, 2024, the environmental clock year jumped from 3 to 2. Photo: taz/screenshot

Berlin Taz | Sunday morning is here, early: the first number of taz-CO2– The clock has run. On the taz website, she counts down the years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds until the global CO starts.2– The budget is exhausted. There are still three years left until Sunday to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, but only two are left.

Starting point of taz-CO2– The clock is on the Paris Climate Agreement. In 2015, signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change pledged to “work to limit” global average temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The world has now long since temporarily traveled beyond that point. The past 12 months have been the hottest ever measured, with the global average already 1.64 degrees Celsius above late 19th-century levels, the observation service Copernicus reported Friday.

The Tazz CO2– The clock points to the whole world. If it was made for Germany, it would have expired long ago. At least that’s what the Environmental Advisory Committee assumes: “Germany, in particular, accounts for a significant share of global CO2.2“We have recently exceeded the budget available to keep warming to 1.5 degrees,” a government advisory panel wrote in March.

Fairness in accounting means, among other things, that every inhabitant of the planet is given the same amount of CO .2 Granted, that means not only do we divide the global budget into nearly 200 countries around the world, but we also take into account the number of people living there. In that way, the US has a calculated CO.2– The remaining budget was exhausted by the end of 2021. India, on the other hand, is likely to emit at least some greenhouse gases for decades to come.

Ensures reduced emissions through rounding effect

This “budgetary approach” is popular in the scientific community because it exposes many politicians’ claims as false. “If we set the right course for the next ten years, we will be on the right path,” says CDU leader Friedrich Merz.

CO2-uhr der taz shows the opposite. Anyone who has been watching this clock closely will probably have noticed that the clock has actually already gone down less than three years ago, last fall, and has been reset in the meantime. So does that mean humanity doesn’t need to rush to protect the climate as much as it did in 2023?

Unfortunately, this is just a rounding effect. The clock is regularly reset and adjusted to the latest scientific publications, including indicators of global climate change, which scientists there finalize when calculating global CO.2-Budgets are always set in units of 50 gigatons of CO.2This means that the budget remained unchanged after the update, even though more emissions were emitted last year than the previous year.

The Tazz CO2– I’m not the only one who sees the drama of the situation. For example, the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change also has a ticking climate clock (although with slightly different data).

Of course, there are criticisms of this way of presenting the problem. After all – now – in two years, 11 months and a few days, a giant tidal wave will not sweep across the country and destroy all life. Roland Emmerich’s classic film “The Day After Tomorrow” from 2004. Somehow, it will be the same even after taz-CO.2-Keep going. Still, do you really have to rely on it?

Source link