Right-wing media could not be more wrong about the 1.5°C carbon budget paper | Dana Nuccitelli

As usual, conservative media outlets distorted a climate science paper to advance the denialist agendaLast week, Nature Geoscience published a study suggesting that we have a bigger remaining carbon budget than previously thought to keep global warming below the 1.5°C aggressive Paris climate target. Many scientists quickly commented that the paper’s conclusion was based on some questionable assumptions, and this single study shouldn’t be blindly accepted as gospel truth.Conservative media outlets did even worse than that. They took one part of the paper’s analysis out of context and grossly distorted its conclusions to advance their anti-climate agenda.Headline claim from carbon budget paper that warming is 0.9ºC from pre-I is unsupported. Using globally complete estimates ~1.2ºC (in 2015) pic.twitter.com/B4iImGzeDEWe haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.Claim of a substantial gap between model projections for global temperature & observations is not true (updated with 2017 estimate): pic.twitter.com/YHzzXtbhs9I think some press reporting is misleading as our paper did not assess climate impacts or climate model performance. Rather, our paper confirms the need for much increased urgent action from around the world if society stands a chance of limiting warming to 1.5C.the IPCC specifically assessed that temperatures in the 2020s would be 0.9-1.3C warmer than pre-industrial, the lower end of which is already looking conservative. Anyone who had troubled to read our paper would have found this “IPCC AR5 Ch11 projection” helpfully labelled on two of our figures, and clearly consistent with our new results. Continue reading...