Calm down, everyone. The new head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jim Skea, warned it’s not helpful to imply a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius is an existential threat to humanity, declaring apocalyptic messaging merely “paralyses” the public and fails to motivate them to protect the planet.
Skea spoke less than 48-hours after U.N. chief Antonio Guterres rolled out some of his most frightening climate rhetoric to date declaring “the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived,” as Breitbart News reported.
The British academic and professor at Imperial College London used two German news outlets over the weekend to make his plea to the noisier climate catastrophists.
According to Deutsche Welle (DW) the German public, state-owned international broadcaster, Skea was direct in his call for calm as he settled into his new role.
The outlet said during an exchange with the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, in an interview first published on Saturday, Skea warned against laying too much value on the international community’s current notional target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to the pre-industrial era.
“We should not despair and fall into a state of shock” if global temperatures were to increase by this amount, he reportedly said.
In a separate discussion with German news agency DPA, Skea went on to further set out his reasoning in the wake of Guterres flicking the rhetorical switch to overdrive in warning of a planet that is “boiling” just days before.
WATCH: U.N. Chief Guterres Declares “Terrifying Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived”
The 69-year-old, who has been involved with the IPCC since its foundation in the 1990s, sees no benefit in always scaring people.
“If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” he said.
“The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees,” Skea told Der Spiegel. “It will however be a more dangerous world.”
DW set out the international community’s stated target is currently to limit global warming to the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, even though U.N. estimates suggest the current commitments made by countries are actually likely to fall short of that declared goal.
Under the 2015 Paris treaty, nations promised to collectively cap the rise in the planet’s average temperature at “well below” 2C, and at 1.5C if possible, based on computer modelling and scientific estimations.
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