the global average temperature was more than 2 degrees Celsius hotter than levels before industrialization, The Earth’s temperature briefly rose above a crucial threshold that scientists have been warning for decades could have catastrophic and irreversible impacts on the planet and its ecosystems. Copernicus Climate Change Service, in Europe. The threshold was crossed just temporarily and does not mean that the world is at a permanent state of warming above 2 degrees, but it is a symptom of a planet getting steadily hotter and hotter, and moving towards a longer-term situation where climate crisis impacts will be difficult — in some cases impossible — to reverse. “Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than 2°C above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels, at 2.06°C,” Burgess said in her post that global temperatures on Friday averaged 1.17 degrees above 1991-2020 levels, making it the warmest November 17 on record. But compared to pre-industrial times, before humans began burning fossil fuels on a large scale and altering the Earth’s natural climate, the temperature was 2.06 degrees warmer..The world already looks on track to breach 1.5 degrees of warming on a longer-term basis in the next few years, a threshold beyond which scientists say humans and ecosystems will struggle to adapt.A UN report published showed that even if countries carried out their current emissions-reduction pledges, the world would reach between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees of warming sometime this century. But 1.5 is not a cliff edge for the Earth — every fraction of a degree it warms above that, the worse the impacts will be. Warming to 2 degrees puts far more of the population at risk of deadly extreme weather and increases the likelihood of the planet reaching irreversible tipping points, such as the collapse of the polar ice sheets and the mass death of coral reefs. data comes on heels of the hottest 12 months on record, and after a year of extreme weather events, supercharged by the climate crisis, including fires in Hawaii, floods in northern Africa and storms in the Mediterranean. Scientists are increasingly expressing alarm that data on temperatures are exceeding their predictions. A string of reports checking the health of the Earth’s climate and humans’ actions to combat it in recent weeks show that the planet is careening toward a dangerous level of warming, and not doing enough to mitigate or adapt to its impacts. A UN report last week found that according to countries’ climate plans, planet-heating pollution in 2030 will still be 9% higher than it was in 2010. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world needs to decrease emissions by 45% by the end of this decade compared to 2010 to have any hope of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. An increase of 9% means that target is way off. Another UN report also found that the world is planning to blow the fossil fuels production limit that would keep a lid on global heating. By 2030, countries plan to produce more than twice the limit of fossil fuels that would cap warming at 1.5 degrees.