PLEA Network

Climate News Network, 7 August 2018, Hothouse Earth could soon be unavoidable. Human actions threaten to push the planet into a new state, called Hothouse Earth. In such a world global average temperatures could stabilise at 4°C or even 5°C higher than they have been for most of human history.Global sea levels, too, would rise, by 10 metres, or even as much as 60 metres, to drown all the world’s great coastal cities. Such a transition might happen “in only a century or two”, but once started, there might be no stopping it. It would be uncontrollable and dangerous to many and “it poses severe risks for health, economies, political stability … and ultimately the habitability of the planet for humans.” And, say scientists who have completed a survey of the research landscape, there is no knowing how close the threshold of dramatic change might be. The planet has already warmed by 1°C in the last century, and the thermometer is climbing at a rate of 0.17°C per decade. Even at the ambitious target temperature rise of no more than 2°C by the end of the century – a target endorsed by 195 nations in Paris in 2015 – humans might already have triggered a cascade of feedbacks that would set the planet sliding to a point hotter than at any time in the last 10 million years. Read more here