2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change set the goal of limiting global warming by the end of the century to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which is 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above what it was before the industrial age. That was thought to be the threshold for averting severe climate change impacts. But now new research published in the journal Communications, Earth

and Environment says that even that level is too high to prevent the catastrophic consequences

of sea level rise due to melting glaciers. Chris Stokes is one of the authors of that study.

He's a professor at England's Durham University where he studies glaciers.

Chris Stokes, we're currently at 1.2, as I understand it, above pre-industrial levels.

If we were just to maintain that level, not get any worse, what would be the effects on glaciers and sea level?

So that was actually one of the questions that we tried to answer in our research. And the answer to that question is the ice sheets, the polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, they're losing almost

400 billion tons of ice per year. And this is a trend that started in the kind of early 1990s.

And it's something that we're really worried about

because some of the changes we're seeing now

in terms of the mass of ice being lost is really quite dramatic.

And what would that mean for sea levels?

Yeah, so at the moment, the global average sea level

all around the world is rising at about four and a half millimeters per year.

So if you take that four and a half millimeters per year that we're currently experiencing at the

moment and you just carry on at that same rate of acceleration before the end of this century

will hit that kind of, you know, one centimeter per year. So that means,

you know, our young children who will be living into their 80s and 90s will be living

with sea level rising at a centimeter per year. And that means that their children will then

have to cope with one meter of sea level rise over 100 years. So this is really quite alarming.

As I say, the changes that we're seeing and measuring at the moment are perhaps what we're seeing

is the worst case scenario playing out before our rise. What would be the optimal level warming

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