• The Paris Climate Accords in 2015 set an ambitious (and necessary) goal of keeping global temperatures at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temps. But a study says we might’ve blown past that threshold several years ago.
• Scientists at the University Western Australia Oceans Institute studied long-lived Caribbean sclerosponges and created an ocean temperature timeline dating back to the 1700s.
• While the study claims that we surpassed 1.5 degrees Celsius in 2020, other scientists question if data from just one part of the world is enough to capture the immense thermal complexity of our oceans.

Whatever your stance is on climate change (it’s real, let’s move on), it’s impossible to have missed the near-ubiquitous call to action to “keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels.” Over the past few years, the somewhat bureaucratic phrase has become a rallying cry for the climate conscious.

This ambitious target first surfaced following the Paris Climate Agreement, and describes a sort of climate threshold—if we pass a long-term average increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees Celsius, […]