SRINAGAR: In a tragic incident that took place more than a decade ago, a man was sentenced to life imprisonment by Principal Sessions Judge Reasi R N Wattal for killing his wife and 10-year-old child. The case had been under trial for years, and the verdict was delivered on Monday.
According to the prosecution, the police received information from reliable sources on March 7, 2010, that the body of Shiv Devi, the wife of Kuldeep Singh, was found on the road leading from Shikari to Thuroo in the Dubri forest. A short distance away, the body of their 10-year-old child, Sachin, and the weapon used in the crime were also discovered.
During the investigation, it was revealed that the accused and the deceased had been married for 13 to 14 years and had two children. The accused, who was working in Kangra Himachal Pradesh, used to quarrel with his wife over suspicions of her having an illicit relationship. Due to the strained relations, Shiv Devi was living with her parents at Bathoi.
On the day of the incident, the accused called his wife to the Dubri forest and administered some drug to her and their son, rendering them unconscious. He then killed them both. The police presented a charge sheet before Munsiff (JMIC), Mahore, who committed the case to Principal Sessions Judge Reasi for judicial determination.
After hearing the prosecution and the defense, the judge observed that the nature of the offense committed by the accused played an important role in awarding the punishment. “The penal statute has prescribed punishment for the offense of murder for life or capital punishment, and to view such offenses once proved lightly is itself an afferent to humanity,” the court said.
The judge also noted that there are only two types of punishment for an offense under Section 302 RPC – life imprisonment or the death penalty. “The convict is as such sentenced to undergo life imprisonment for the commission of the offense under Section 302 of RPC and imprisonment of two years for the commission of offense under Section 4/25 Arms Act,” the court said.
The verdict has brought closure to the family of the deceased after a long and difficult legal battle. The court’s decision is a reminder that such heinous crimes will not be taken lightly and will be dealt with severely.
SRINAGAR: Amid fresh snowfall at several places in the Valley, Jammu and Kashmir has continued to receive intermittent rainfall for the last few days, bringing down the mercury in the Union Territory. A few stations including Qazigund and Kokernag in South Kashmir’s Anantnag district, and Banihal in Jammu division recorded massive precipitation in the last 24 hours.
The twin stations in South Kashmir, Qazigund and Kokernag, witnessed the highest rainfall in the last 24 hours after a gap of 13 years, where 49.8 mm and 62.2 mm rainfall were recorded, respectively. The data shared by the Meteorological department (MeT) reveals that Banihal in Jammu division recorded a rainfall of 40.2 mm in the last 24 hours after a gap of 10 years.
As per the data, J&K received the highest-ever 24-hour rainfall of 66.2 mm in the month of May on 23rd in the year 1987. Nonetheless, the data shows that the average rainfall of 16.8 mm was recorded in Jammu & Kashmir in the last 24 hours.
The data shows that the highest rainfall of 88.0 mm in Qazigund was recorded on May 23, 1965, which is nearly 50 per cent lower than the last 24 hours of rainfall recorded at the station. In Kokernag, the highest rainfall of 67.7 mm was recorded on May 29, 2010, which is a few mm lower than the last 24-hour rainfall recorded at the station.
At Banihal station, the highest-ever rainfall of 24 hours was recorded on May 23, 1965, at 101.6 mm, which is nearly 60 per cent less than the last 24 hours’ rainfall.
However, Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, recorded a rainfall of 1.6 mm in the last 24 hours till 08:30 AM while Pahalgam in South Kashmir recorded a rainfall of 15.1 mm, as per the official data.
As per the data, Gulmarg recorded a rainfall of 10.8 mm in the last 24 hours while Batote in Jammu division recorded a rainfall of 20.3 mm.
Deputy Director, MeT, Dr Mukhtar Ahmad, when contacted, told KNO that there was nothing new in the frequent wet spell in the month of May. “The precipitation in the month of May has not been witnessed in the past couple of years. That doesn’t mean that the rainfall during the ensuing month is unusual,” he said.
Last year in May, Jammu & Kashmir recorded a rainfall of 124.5 mm, while the highest with 28.6 mm rainfall was recorded on May 05.
Moreover, some areas in Kashmir, including higher reaches of Kulgam, Tulail Gurez, Gulmarg, and others, experienced fresh snowfall since Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, Director MeT, Sonum Lotus, said that there would be a significant improvement in the weather conditions from tomorrow. Still, he stated that as per the forecast, the weather would remain mainly dry, but the rains and thunderstorm in the late afternoon or evening cannot be ruled out at some places.
From May 10-15, the weather would remain mainly dry while the temperature would also go up as the warmer days are expected from May 10 onwards, he said.
Besides, the day temperature has also plummeted in J&K parts while an Independent Weather Forecaster, Faizan Arif Keng, said that February-like weather conditions were witnessed in parts of Jammu and Kashmir.
In Srinagar, he said that the day temperature settled at 13.6 degree Celsius, which is 10.0 degree Celsius below normal, adding that the mercury settled at 2.2 degree Celsius in Gulmarg, which is 12.0 degree Celsius below normal while Pahalgam recorded a maximum temperature of 8.1 degree Celsius, which is 12.1 degree Celsius below normal.
Many other stations like Qazigund, Kokernag, Kupwara, Jammu, Banihal, Batote, Bhaderwah and Katra also recorded below normal temperature today. (KNO)
Srinagar, May 08: Amid fresh snowfall at several places in the Valley, Jammu and Kashmir has continued to receive intermittent rainfall for the last few days, bringing down the mercury in the Union Territory while a few stations including Qazigund and Kokernag in South Kashmir’s Anantnag district and Banihal in Jammu division recorded a massive precipitation in the last 24 hours.
According to the data available with the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO), the twin stations in South Kashmir including Qazigund and Kokernag witnessed highest rainfall in the last 24 hours after the gap of 13 years where 49.8 mm and 62.2 mm rainfall was recorded respectively.
The data shared by the Meteorological department (MeT) here, reveals that Banihal in Jammu division has recorded a rainfall of 40.2 mm in the last 24 hours after a gap of 10 years.
As per the data, J&K has received the highest-ever 24-hour rainfall of 66.2 mm in the month of May on 23rd in the year 1987.
Nonetheless, the data shows that the average rainfall of 16.8 mm was recorded in Jammu & Kashmir in the last 24 hours.
The data shows that the highest rainfall of 88.0 mm in Qazigund was recorded on May 23, 1965, which is nearly 50 per cent lower than the last 24 hours of rainfall recorded at the station.
In Kokernag, the highest rainfall of 67.7 mm was recorded on May 29, 2010, which is a few mm lower than the last 24 hour rainfall recorded at the station.
At Banihal station, the highest-ever rainfall of 24 hours was recorded on May 23, 1965 at 101.6 mm, which is nearly 60 per cent less than the last 24 hours rainfall.
However, Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, has recorded a rainfall of 1.6 mm in the last 24 hours till 08:30 AM while Pahalgam in South Kashmir has recorded a rainfall of 15.1 mm, the official data reveals.
As per the data, Gulmarg recorded a rainfall of 10.8 mm in the last 24 hours while Bataote in Jammu division has recorded a rainfall of 20.3 mm.
Deputy Director, MeT, Dr Mukhtar Ahmad when contacted told KNO that there was nothing new in the frequent wet spell in the month of May. “The precipitation in the month of May has not been witnessed in the past couple of years.That doesn’t mean that the rainfall during the ensuing month is unusual,” he said.
Last year in the month of May, Jammu & Kashmir as per the data has recorded a rainfall of 124.5 mm while the highest with 28.6 mm rainfall was recorded on May 05.
Moreover, some of the areas in Kashmir including higher reaches of Kulgam, Tulail Gurez, Gulmarg and others experienced fresh snowfall since Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, Director MeT, Sonum Lotus said that there would be a significant improvement in the weather conditions from tomorrow, but stated that as per the forecast the weather would remain mainly dry, but the rains and thunderstorm in the late afternoon or evening cannot be ruled out at some places.
From May 10-15, the weather would remain mainly dry while the temperature would also go up as the warmer days are expected from May 10 onwards, he said.
Besides, the day temperature has also plummeted in J&K parts while an Independent Weather Forecaster, Faizan Arif Keng said that February-like weather conditions were witnessed in parts of Jammu and Kashmir.
In Srinagar, he said that the day temperature settled at 13.6 degree Celsius, which is 10.0 degree Celsius below normal, adding that the mercury settled at 2.2 degree Celsius in Gulmarg, which is 12.0 degree Celsius below normal while Pahalgam recorded a maximum temperature of 8.1 degree Celsius, which is 12.1 degree Celsius below normal.
Many other stations like Qazigund, Kokernag, Kupwara, Jammu, Banihal, Batote, Bhaderwah and Katra also recorded below normal temperature today—(KNO)
London: Millions of lives could be saved by a groundbreaking set of new vaccines for a range of conditions including cancer, experts have said.
A leading pharmaceutical firm said it is confident that jabs for cancer, cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, and other conditions will be ready by 2030, the Guardian reported.
Studies into these vaccinations are also showing “tremendous promise”, with some researchers saying 15 years’ worth of progress has been “unspooled” in 12 to 18 months thanks to the success of the Covid jab.
Paul Burton, the chief medical officer of pharmaceutical company Moderna, said he believes the firm will be able to offer such treatments for “all sorts of disease areas” in as little as five years.
The firm, which created a leading coronavirus vaccine, is developing cancer vaccines that target different tumour types, the Guardian reported.
Burton said: “We will have that vaccine and it will be highly effective, and it will save many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives. I think we will be able to offer personalised cancer vaccines against multiple different tumour types to people around the world.”
He also said that multiple respiratory infections could be covered by a single injection — allowing vulnerable people to be protected against Covid, flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) — while mRNA therapies could be available for rare diseases for which there are currently no drugs, the Guardian reported.
Therapies based on mRNA work by teaching cells how to make a protein that triggers the body’s immune response against disease.
“It’s going to be chaotic,” said Douglas Rediker, who represented the U.S. on the board of the International Monetary Fund from 2010 to 2012.
Underscoring the budding fears, the World Bank last month warned of a looming “lost decade” for the economy that could sap momentum for fighting poverty and addressing climate change.
The expanding list of economic uncertainties will pervade next week’s spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank just a few blocks from the White House, setting up major challenges for leaders as they grapple with food and energy constraints, severe debt loads on developing countries and global warming.
“There’s going to be a great deal of hand-wringing with the state of the global economy,” said Mark Sobel, U.S. chair at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum and a former Treasury Department official who served as U.S. representative to the IMF. “A lot of perplexing questions. A lot of fog.”
Rediker described the mood as “disjointed.”
“There are a lot of different threads going into these meetings and they’re not necessarily harmonized in one narrative,” said Rediker, managing partner at International Capital Strategies. “You’ve got them all happening at once at a time when there’s no particular leadership that is driving the agenda or the narrative in one direction or another.”
U.S. officials, led by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, will try to project cautious optimism but will also face questions about the government’s response to last month’s regional bank failures and to what extent there is potential spillover in the global economy, especially as lenders tighten credit for businesses.
“You don’t have any real motor of growth,” said Liliana Rojas-Suarez, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “It’s not that it’s one region that is weaker than the other. Wherever you look, growth is really low, and so of course that affects everything else.”
The U.S. economy is expected to grow by a tepid 0.4 percent this year, according to the Federal Reserve, before modestly accelerating to 1.2 percent in 2024. The Fed has driven the slowdown with the steepest interest rate hikes in four decades designed to tame inflation.
“There’s a fundamental challenge for the U.S., which is first and foremost it’s coming there speaking about growth in its economy, how it’s doing relatively well compared to the other advanced economies,” said Josh Lipsky, senior director at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center and a former adviser to the IMF.
Growth prospects in Europe are uncertain as it also deals with a roiled banking industry. The European Union managed to weather the winter better than expected and skirt a recession thanks to a drop in energy prices that had reached eye-popping highs last summer.
But core measures of inflation keep rising, and the ensuing fast-and-furious tightening of the money supply by the European Central Bank spells worries for the bloc’s outlook.
The EU economy is expected to stagnate this year below 1 percentage point of growth, hitting the brakes after posting 3.5 percent last year — higher than both the U.S. and China.
“I don’t think the IMF meetings are going to be in a hopeful mood — it’s going to be kind of depressing,” Rojas-Suarez said. “People are going to pull up good potential outcomes — like, the stock market is recovering, financial contagion seems to have moderated, the markets are relatively calm now. But at the same time, the sense of fragility in every corner that you turn is I think the mood that is going to be prevalent.”
A major issue hovering over the meetings is the role of China, which just underwent a big government shakeup and is increasingly at odds with the U.S. over trade and technology. Questions include whether China should have a bigger say in the governance of international institutions commensurate with its economic power and whether it will help with efforts to ease the debt strain on developing countries, given that it’s such a big lender.
“You get to a point where the very legitimacy of the institutions themselves gets challenged,” Rediker said.
The World Trade Organization said Wednesday that global trade is expected to grow by 1.7 percent this year — a stronger outlook than it had in October. Still, it warned that the international economy is fragile, with commerce still recovering from Covid-19, continuing shockwaves from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and high inflation.
The World Bank — the international lender to developing countries — said last week that new policies are needed to boost productivity and accelerate investment to head off what could be a trying decade for the global economy.
The IMF on Wednesday separately warned that the world could lose trillions of dollars of future economic output if it splits into competing geopolitical factions.
The World Bank’s outgoing president, David Malpass, says the global economy is suffering from stagflation – meaning low growth with stubborn price inflation. He said at an Atlantic Council event Tuesday that the U.S. and China have rebounded but that there needs to be much more production and productivity to break out of stagflation.
That comes as the world experiences what he describes as a “reversal in development,” with rising poverty and worsening literacy problems.
“If you look at things today, the challenge is that there may not be progress,” Malpass said. “We need to avoid that lost decade.”
Paola Tamma contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Sania Mirza at the CII’s annual regional summit on “South India@100: Going Beyond Boundaries”.
Hyderabad: President of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Sanjiv Bajaj said that for any country to achieve sustained economic growth, taking risks is essential. He was speaking at the CII’s annual regional summit on “South India@100: Going Beyond Boundaries”.
The chairman of Bajaj Finserv Ltd Sanjiv Bajaj said, “The next decade belongs to India. We have a vibrant innovation ecosystem in the country. The top three developments in the next 25 years would be in physical and digital infrastructure.”
Director General of CII Chandrajit Banerjee said “The digital universe in 25 years will likely be characterized by a greater integration of technology into daily lives, 2047 will see an increasingly important role in the digital world”.
Chairperson of CII Suchitra Ella said that India has been making great strides in improving its ecosystem for innovation which is evident in its improvement in the Global Innovation Index. “India is ranked 40th in the Global Innovation Index 2022. India has also performed well in areas such as Knowledge creation, impact, and diffusion. We need to build adequate infrastructure that supports this innovation,” she added.
Norfolk Southern’s accident rate jumped 80.8 percent between 2013 and 2022, to 3.658 accidents per million miles traveled, from 2.023. Norfolk is one of seven “Class 1″ railroads. Overall, the group had 27 percent more accidents, a rate of 3.067 accidents per million miles traveled, up from a rate of 2.415 in 2013.
The increased accident rate comes as the chemical industry predicts a rise in the amount of chemicals that will be shipped by rail, trucks and other forms of transportation.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday the National Transportation Safety Board announced a special investigation into Norfolk Southern’s “safety culture” after the railroad had its third serious accident in just over a month.
Another Norfolk Southern train derailed Saturday in Springfield, Ohio, and a conductor for the railroad was killed Tuesday by a dump truck as a train was moving through a steel mill in Cleveland, the company said.
The conductor, 46-year-old Louis Shuster, was a father and an Army veteran who had worked at the railroad since 2005, according to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“The NTSB is concerned that several organizational factors may be involved in the accidents, including safety culture,” the safety board said in a news release.
The American Association of Railroads argues that the safety data E&E News reviewed includes minor collisions that happen in train yards and that the number of “main line” incidents like the one in East Palestine has been dropping.
“If you were going to look at the main line accidents … 2022 was the lowest year in history overall,” Mike Rush, the trade group’s senior vice president of operations and safety, said in an interview.
Norfolk Southern, whose CEO is due to testify in a Senate hearing Thursday, declined to comment on the federal safety data but said in a prepared statement that the company is committed to safety.
“We diligently monitor our trains and infrastructure to identify potential hazards, and we invest approximately a billion annually into maintaining our infrastructure every year,” the statement said.
About 19 percent of U.S. chemical output travels by rail, according to AAR. The bulk — 57 percent — moves by truck, and the remainder by ships, barges and pipelines.
Trucks by far have the highest incident rate.
Of all transportation incidents involving hazardous materials in 2022, trucks were responsible for nearly 94 percent, according to Bureau of Transportation statistics. Trains were responsible for a little more than 1 percent.
Truck accidents have been rising, along with other road accidents, for a variety of reasons, including speeding and distracted driving, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
“The road safety is nowhere near as good as rail safety,” said Nicholas Little, the director of railway education at Michigan State University. “There’s less chance of a vehicle-to-vehicle accident … and, also, there’s less habitation around the tracks, because it’s not just freeways that the trucks will be going on, they’d be going on local roads, as well.”
But not every chemical is suitable for rail transportation.
How chemicals are transported usually depends on the quantity needed and location of its final destination, Little said. And when rail accidents do happen, the potential for greater environmental damage is larger because trains can carry much bigger quantities of chemicals than trucks, he said.
“Even the biggest highway truck only carries a quarter of the volume that a railcar can carry,” Little said.
The FRA data includes derailments, collisions between trains and other on-rail problems. The numbers cover only the first 11 months of 2022.
Looking strictly at on-rail accidents, three of the freight railroads — Norfolk Southern, CSX Corp. and Union Pacific Corp. — had higher rates over the last 10 years.
Norfolk Southern had one of the lowest accident rates in 2013 and now has the second highest behind Union Pacific, which averaged 4.359 collisions per million miles last year.
The accident rate didn’t appear correlated to the amount of freight on Norfolk Southern’s system. The company’s revenue ton mileage, a metric based on the revenue from one ton of freight shipped over one mile, rose from 2013 to 2018, before falling during the pandemic and bouncing back in the last two years, according to securities filings. Overall, the company had about an 8 percent drop in revenue ton miles over the last decade.
The accident rates at Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern are far lower than they were in the 1970s and ‘80s. But they also show a stark contrast to the other four Class 1 railroads — BNSF, Canadian National, Kansas City Southern and Canadian Pacific — where accident rates fell between 5 percent and 65 percent over the last decade.
Political oversight
To date, the bulk of the congressional investigations and other political fallout have focused on the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency, not on the rise in accident rates across the industry.
Politicians from both parties have called for stricter safety standards, although it’s unclear if the proposals would have prevented the Ohio wreck.
The 149-car train derailed shortly before 9 p.m. on Feb. 3 just outside East Palestine, a town of about 4,700 that sits near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. An automated system detected an overheated wheel bearing on one of the cars, which triggered an alarm.
The crew was trying to stop the train when a section of it derailed. Thirty-eight cars left the tracks and several of them caught fire.
Some of the cars contained hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride and other chemicals. Vinyl chloride, which is used to make common types of plastic, is a carcinogen that creates poisonous gases when it burns, and it also poses an explosion risk.
Three days after the train derailed, local and state officials decided to release the vinyl chloride into a trench and conduct a controlled burn, rather than risk a larger explosion. No one was killed or seriously injured, but the fire sent up a plume of black smoke that left residents complaining about lung irritation and foul odors.
EPA has tested air quality in more than 500 homes, while state officials test the local water system; they have found no hazardous chemical levels. Independent tests by Texas A&M University found high levels of chemicals in the air, which could lead to health problems if the levels persist.
Norfolk Southern announced a series of safety improvements Monday, including assessing how frequently its hot bearing detectors are spaced and testing a new type of hot bearing detector and a new type of acoustic sensor. The company is also developing new technology to search for track defects and is working with the rest of the rail industry on setting standards for when hot bearing detectors should trigger an alarm.
Norfolk Southern and the other six major railroads announced last week that they’re joining a program that allows employees to confidentially report close calls among trains without fear of retaliation.
Safety advocates have used the wreck to call for tighter regulations on rails, calls that have been echoed by several officeholders and by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Since the accident, DOT has announced “targeted track inspections” for routes known to carry hazardous materials and issued a safety advisory for certain aluminum tank car covers, a part that is now known to have melted during the Ohio crash.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee have announced hearings into Buttigieg’s handling of the wreck, including when he knew about the derailment. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia asked Buttigieg for information about the adoption of a more modern braking system, known as electronically controlled pneumatic brakes.
The system allows engineers to activate the brakes simultaneously on every car in a train, which could help trains stop more quickly and smoothly. The conventional air brakes on most trains use an air hose that connects the locomotive to the freight cars, so it transmits the braking signal more slowly than an electronic signal.
Republican Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Marco Rubio of Florida sent a letter to Buttigieg asking about both the length of the train and the number of crew members on board. Last week, the two senators were part of a bipartisan group that introduced a railroad safety bill.
Long trains, short crews
The Federal Railroad Administration defines a train with 150 or more cars as “very long” — one more than the train that derailed in East Palestine.
A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office said the number of long trains on the rails was increasing and said crew training “is particularly important for their safe operation.”
The FRA is currently writing rules that would require two-person crews on more freight trains. The industry has resisted the idea, saying that personnel decisions should be made by the companies and arguing that automation can safely reduce the number of crew members.
Automated trains have been operated safely in other countries, including in Australia, where they’re used to transport long trains of iron ore, said Allan Zarembski, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware who specializes in railroads.
All the proposed solutions come with benefits and drawbacks, Zarembski said. Using electronically controlled brakes would improve a train’s stopping power, but it costs more than conventional air brakes. And the system would have to be widely adopted because railroads often haul carloads of hazardous materials mixed with other freights cars.
Electronically controlled braking systems “are at the top of the list” for suggested safety improvements on freight trains, said Little, of Michigan State University. “But when you’re dealing with over 1.6 million rail cars that are in operation, it’s a very, very big task.”
Michael Gorman, a rail consultant and faculty at University of Dayton’s school of business administration, echoed industry concerns, warning of “unintended consequences of poorly thought-out legislation.”
Expensive rail safety improvements would create a higher cost of shipping and could turn businesses away from trains and toward the more accident-prone trucks, Gorman said.
“Right now, we’re in reaction mode, and overreaction is likely to be the results,” Gorman said.
In a 2015 report on rail safety that was written to help the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection cope with an influx of trains carrying crude oil, Zarembski made a series of recommendations.
Some of the steps are mundane, including slower speeds through populated area, while others are high-tech, such as more frequent use of automated track inspections. None of them were new ideas at the time, Zarembski said.
“I haven’t seen anything revolutionary coming down the pike … that’s being ignored by the railroad industry that’s an obvious no-brainer,” he said.
“I think the process is going to continue to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Boston: The world will cross the global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius within 10 to 15 years, even if emissions decline, according to a study that employed artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the results.
If emissions remain high over the next few decades, the study predicts a one-in-two chance that Earth will become 2 degrees Celsius hotter on average compared to pre-industrial times by the middle of this century, and a more than four-in-five chance of reaching that threshold by 2060.
The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, employed AI to predict climate change using recent temperature observations from around the world.
“Using an entirely new approach that relies on the current state of the climate system to make predictions about the future, we confirm that the world is on the cusp of crossing the 1.5 C threshold,” said the study’s lead author, Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University in the US.
“Our AI model is quite convinced that there has already been enough warming that 2 C is likely to be exceeded if reaching net-zero emissions takes another half century,” said Diffenbaugh, who co-authored the research with Colorado State University atmospheric scientist Elizabeth Barnes.
The finding may be controversial, Diffenbaugh said, because other authoritative assessments, including the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have concluded that the 2-degree mark is unlikely to be reached if emissions decline to net zero before 2080.
Crossing the 1.5 C and 2 C thresholds would mean failing to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement, in which countries pledged to keep global warming to “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial levels, while pursuing the more ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5 C.
Previous assessments have used global climate models to simulate future warming trajectories; statistical techniques to extrapolate recent warming rates; and carbon budgets to calculate how quickly emissions will need to decline to stay below the Paris Agreement targets.
