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Category: Project

Description: The Paris Agreement aims to limit global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial. The 1.5°C temperature target is a global average and does not reflect the warming to which people have been exposed. This makes it difficult for people to associate the temperature target with their own experiences. We employ a novel pattern scaling technique to present local annually-resolved, gridded temperature anomalies with respect to definition of the preindustrial prior to the industrial burning of fossil fuels (1400--1800 CE) for the first time. The warmest year so far, 2016 CE, was 1.26°C above preindustrial. When accounting for the distribution of the human population and urban heat island effect, we find that during the same year people experienced an average warming of 1.73°C above preindustrial. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015 CE, the majority of the global population was exposed to annual, local temperatures higher than its 1.5°C target. Higher temperatures and increasing urbanisation will exacerbate the warmth people experience in the future, particularly in cities.