Bionic Planet: Your Guide To The New Reality

When countries around the world ratified the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, they pledged to prevent average global temperatures from rising to a level more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels. They picked that number because 2 degrees Celsius is the point at which climate models start going haywire, but they also asked the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, to review all of the available research and tell us what we'd have to do to keep that rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the point at which feedback loops like melting tundras and increased water vapor make the 2-degree increase all but inevitable. Scientists from around the world spent the last two years reviewing over 6,000 scientific papers and mapping out different pathways to the 1.5-degree target -- from paths that focus primarily on reducing energy demand to those that focus primarily on expanding carbon sinks that pull greenhouse gasses out of the atmosph