'Global boiling': Billions already suffer in heat over 1.5C limit
Many people live with temperatures above the Paris Agreement's ceiling for global warming as land heats faster than the oceans.
- Many people live with local temperatures above 1.5C
- Europe, Arctic, Africa among world's fastest-warming regions
- Slow pace of ocean heating puts brakes on global warming
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"Many people are living in areas that have already warmed more than 1.5C, and ... the main reason for this is that the land warms faster than the oceans," said Robert Rohde, chief scientist at Berkeley Earth, a U.S. non-profit research group.
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"People tend to disproportionately live near coastal areas, which tend to have lower rates of warming due to their proximity to oceans," he said, evening out the average person's long-term experience of warming.
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"We've already breached 1.5 temporarily," said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Copernicus, which tracks global temperatures. "Ironically, we were over 1.5 when the Paris Agreement was adopted".
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"I would stress that there is nothing special about 1.5C locally (or 2C etc) - the Paris agreements reference the long-term global means (which encompass a large amount of spatial variation)," he wrote in an email.
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