The Earth’s temperature on Friday for the first time exceeded the critical threshold set for global warming, the reversal of which scientists have warned for decades could have devastating and irreversible effects on the planet and its ecosystems.

In particular, as Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Europe-based Copernicus Climate Change Agency, told X, last Friday’s global average temperature was just over 2 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels.

The limit was exceeded only temporarily and does not mean that the temperature increase above 2 degrees remains permanently, but the fact demonstrates that the temperature of the planet is steadily increasing leading to a long-term situation where the climate crisis in some cases will be impossible to reverse.

However, this limit must be exceeded on average over several years in order to do so to consider that the threshold of the Paris Agreement has been exceeded.

The agreement, signed in 2015 after the COP21 UN climate summit, aims to keep “the increase in global average temperature well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels” and to continue efforts “so that to limit the increase in temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”.

In a special report by (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — Giec) in 2018, climate experts under the auspices of the UN maintained as a definition of warming an average “over a period of 30 years” in relation to “the period reference 1850-1900”.

Now the climate is considered to have overheated approx by 1.2 degrees Celsius compared to the period 1850-1900.

“We estimate that this was the first day the global temperature was more than 2°C above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels, at 2.06°C,” Burgess wrote in her post , explaining that global temperatures on Friday averaged 1.17 degrees above 1991-2020 levels, making November 17 the warmest day on record.

However, she clarifies that compared to the pre-industrial era, before humans started burning fossil fuels on a large scale and changing Earth’s natural climate, the temperature was 2.06 degrees warmer.

The breach of the critical 2-point threshold came two weeks before the start of the COP28 UN climate conference in Dubai, where countries are expected to take stock of progress on committing to the Paris Climate Agreement, which provides limiting global warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels with the ultimate goal of limiting it to 1.5 degrees.