Julie Brigham-Grette Discusses Global Temperature Threshold with 'The Boston Globe'

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This year, a critical milestone for the planet slipped by with few people noticing: Earth's global temperature crossed a perilous threshold. 

Scientists long warned that surpassing what has been called the "defense line"—1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels—would unleash far more severe consequences of climate change. These include the near-collapse of coral reef ecosystems, accelerated sea-level rise, and increasingly destructive storms. While recent temperature data remains pending, climate experts agree the tipping point has already been reached, marking a sobering turning point in efforts to combat a warming world.

While reporting on this watershed moment, The Boston Globe turned to Julie Brigham-Grette—a professor in the College of Natural Sciences’s Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences and a newly chosen co-lead of the Climate Expert Group for the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program—to weigh in on just how concerned we should be with the surpassing of this threshold:

“Passing it for the first time should start setting off serious alarm bells," said Julie Brigham-Grette, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

— The Boston Globe

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