Even temporarily passing the Paris 2015 limit will mean severe storms, heatwaves and floods

In 2015, world leaders in Paris put great hope in keeping the rise in average global temperatures at or below 1.5C. But global temperatures continue rising relentlessly. The world is now on the brink of overshooting the 1.5C target, and then – what? The hope was to stop pumping out CO₂ and also remove it from the atmosphere to avoid a cataclysm, but that would need 400 gigatonnes of CO₂ to be removed by 2100, using new and as yet untested technology on a vast and economical scale.

A recent report shows that even temporarily overshooting 1.5C will still allow climate change to build up over the next several decades. And that means severe storms, intense heatwaves, deluges of rain and many other disastrous outcomes will carry on increasing.