World won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees: New IPCC head

The newly appointed head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jim Skea, spoke to two major German news outlets.

Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community’s current nominal target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era.

Surpassing that mark would lead to many problems and social tensions, he said, but still that would not constitute an existential threat to humanity.

The international community’s stated target is currently to limit global warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, even though UN estimates suggest that the current commitments made by countries are actually likely to fall far short of their nominal goal. The UN estimates that within roughly a decade, the target is liable to be breached.

James “Jim” Skea is a physics graduate born in Dundee in Scotland who did his doctoral thesis in energy research and has worked at Imperial College London since 2009.

The 69-year-old, who has been involved with the IPCC since its foundation in the 1990s, was named its new chairman on Wednesday.

Skea said that one short-term focus should remain expanding renewable electricity to reduce emissions from fossil fuel electricity generation and from internal combustion engine vehicles.

Skea predicted that one difficult area might prove to be changing people’s lifestyles. He said that no scientist could tell people how to live or what to eat.

Skea said he also wanted to adapt the IPCC so that it could provide better and more targeted advice to specific groups of people on how they could act to combat climate change.

He said he also hoped to make progress during his tenure on how and where money was sent and spent to tackle the problem globally.