Global warming caused by humans might be closer to a crucial climate threshold than current estimates suggest. A study1 of Antarctic ice cores argues that, in 2023, human-driven warming reached 1.49 'C above pre-industrial levels. In 2015, nearly all countries adopted the Paris climate agreement, a legally binding treaty that states that global temperatures should be kept to less than 1.5 'C above pre-industrial levels to reduce the impacts of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests that human-induced warming is currently close to 1.31 'C. However, the IPCC does not track warming in individual years; instead, it compares temperature averages calculated over decades, so its figures trail behind current temperatures. And it uses the average temperature between 1850 and 1900 as its 'pre-industrial' baseline. But carbon dioxide levels and temperatures were increasing long before 1850, so the standard 1850'1900 baseline doesn't capture the full...
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