Hey everyone, I'm Amy Scott, host of how we survive.

And this is burning questions, our series where we answer what you want to know about the climate crisis.

for decades scientists have been sounding the alarm about the Earth's rising temperatures, but now with global averages breaking records and

increases in extreme weather, not a day goes by that we don't hear the words climate

change. But just because we hear about something all the time

doesn't mean we really understand what it means. Take the number 1.5 as in 1.5 degrees Celsius. It's the number we've been hearing for years is the maximum

increase in temperature the Earth can really handle before all sorts of

terrible things start to happen.

On the surface though, one and a half degrees

doesn't sound like that big of a number.

So we decided to talk to some climate experts

to dig into what that number actually means, not just

for the planet but for us humans. To help explain I reached out to Tom D. Liberto.

I'm a climate scientist, science

communicator, and public affairs specialist at NOAA, the National

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So 1.5c threshold3 Refers to an average global warming of 1.5 degrees

Celsius above what's called the pre-industrial period.

And what do we mean when we say pre-industrial period. And what do we mean when we say pre-industrial?

At NOAA, we usually define it as 1850 to 1900

because that is generally before we saw the rise in greenhouse gases but also coincides with a period of time

where we have a good enough representation of observations across the planet where

we can actually generate a data set of actual information for that period.

...