Climate scientists debate a flaw in the Paris climate agreement | Dana Nuccitelli

Ultimately the only thing that matters: we need to cut carbon pollution as much as possible, as fast as possible

In September 2017, a team led by the University of Exeter's Richard Millar published a paper in Nature Geoscience, which was widely reported as suggesting that the Paris climate agreement's aspirational goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures is still technically within our reach. Many other climate scientists were skeptical of this result, and the journal recently published a critique from a team led by the University of Edinburgh's Andrew Schurer.

The debate lies in exactly how the Paris climate target is defined and measured, which has not been precisely established. Millar's team used the UK Met Office and Hadley Centre global surface temperature dataset called HadCRUT4, which begins in 1850 and estimates global surface temperatures have warmed about 0.9C since that time. The team thus calculated the remaining carbon budget that will lead to an additional 0.6C warming.