Welcome to Zero, I'm Oscar Boyd.

This week you've probably seen news stories about a world meteorological organisation study

that says that the global average temperature for a single year

is likely to exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold sometime before 2027.

There's been a lot of discussion around what this all means,

so for this short bonus episode of Zero, I'm sitting down with Akshat to understand the implications.

Akshat, welcome to Zero.

Nice to be here.

So first off, why is the 1.5 degrees Celsius number so important?

Well, one thing because 200 countries have agreed on it.

The Paris Agreement, which was signed in 2015, had almost every country on the planet say that they will keep warming well below 2 degrees Celsius and try to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But it is a good question because both those targets are kind of arbitrary.

And what do you mean by that?

There is no scientific basis to say 2 degrees Celsius is when the planet gets cooked and humans die.

It's what was politically feasible and was seen to be politically feasible when discussions

leading up to the Paris Agreement were taking place.

Now, at that time, only 2 degrees Celsius was on the radar.

And then island nations got really angry because from their perspective, sea levels would

rise so much that many of their countries would be entirely underwater.

And so from their side, it was a complete no-go, and they wanted a more ambitious goal,

and because of that more ambitious goal, they landed with 1.5 degrees Celsius. And from a scientific

perspective, really every 0.1 degrees Celsius matters. And so you won't avoid as much warming as

...