The Best Way to Slow Global Warming? You Decide in This Climate Simulator

Image courtesy of NASA Global Climate Change. Shutterstock credits: wandee007 (left), Amy Johansson (middle), Avatar_023 (right).

It was on Earth Day 2016 when more than 170 nations signed the Paris Agreement calling for limiting global warming “to well below 2°C.” Putting together the terms took years, with the difficult diplomatic work wrapped up by the end of 2015. Of course, the world’s climate emissaries would want to wait for a more dramatic date to sign.

We’re now five Earth Days since Paris, and 50 years since the very first Earth Day. The world has moved from an average temperature increase of 0.06°C in April 1970 to 1.16°C today. That means we’re nearly 60% of the way towards breaching the Paris target, and a stretch goal of staying below 1.5°C is all but dead.

But these decades have not been entirely wasted. Many of the necessary fixes that could only be imagined 50 years ago are now in hand, so no one needs to wait any longer for the futuristic climate solutions to be invented.