Climate report says world won't get as hot as feared but will pass warming limit [View all]

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-future-worst-case-best-danger-cc7a20fba4f5b42ce33024e1b781e7c9

Climate report says world won’t get as hot as feared but will pass warming limit
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Updated 8:05 AM CDT, May 19, 2026

WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists are jettisoning their worst and best case scenarios for a warming world as no longer plausible. That shows how modest gains in the fight to curb climate change have dialed back the most catastrophic of future heating but also confirmed that there’s no chance to limit warming to the international goal set in 2015.

The extremes have become less probable in the past several years because of how we power our world. Carbon dioxide, released from the burning of gas, oil and coal, is chiefly responsible for warming. Increasing use of green energies, like solar, wind and geothermal, which don’t emit carbon dioxide, have lowered top end carbon pollution projections. However, because those changes haven’t been fast enough, the bottom end projections have risen.

The Paris climate agreement in 2015 set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, or the mid-1800s, giving rise to the mantra “1.5 to stay alive,” but now scientists say that even their best case scenario still shoots past that signature temperature mark. On the other end, those same new scenarios no longer include the coal-heavy future that would lead to 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, a scary scenario that many scientific studies used in their future projections.

The new proposed worst case scenario has an end-of-the-century warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), a full degree (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than the old scenario, while the updated best case future is a couple tenths of a degree Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously theorized, squeezing past the Paris goal, said climate scientist Detlef Van Vuuren of Utrecht University, lead author of a recent study laying out future scenarios.

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