"OSLO - Rising global temperatures are on track to far exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming - but governments still have an unopened "toolbox" of policies that can keep that goal alive, the new chair of the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists said.
Jim Skea, a Scottish scientist elected on Wednesday to lead the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in coming years, said existing government plans would lead to warming "closer to 3 degrees than 1.5" above pre-industrial times.
The 2015 Paris climate agreement set goals of keeping global warming to well below 2C (3.6F), while "pursuing efforts" for 1.5C (2.7F) to limit worsening impacts from heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms and higher sea levels.
"If governments chose to put in place the kind of rapid and deep (emissions) cuts that we have said are necessary, who knows, maybe 1.5 will be possible," Skea told Context, after he won a vote by U.N. member states at an IPCC meeting in Nairobi.
But there is no time to lose, emphasised the professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London."
Alister Doyle reports for Thomson Reuters Foundation July 27, 2023.
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