News
Explainer: How close are we to passing 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming?
Since the last Ice Age ended nearly 12,000 years ago and human civilisations developed, the Earth’s long-term average global air temperature has never varied by more than 1.5 degrees above a stable 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit), scientists say.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
State of Play
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.