The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert Polynesia swallowed by the sea the Colorado River thinned to a trickle the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. The Paris climate agreement - the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 - hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution.
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