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Earth passed an internationally agreed-upon global warming threshold on Friday, raising concerns about climate change, its catastrophic consequences, and the efforts to limit it.

Although the planet crossed the ideal threshold only briefly, it can have disastrous outcomes for nature and humankind. According to the preliminary data, global temperatures increased more than two degrees Celsius from the period when humans first started burning fossil fuels and emitting planet-warning greenhouse gases. However, this does not imply that the measures taken to decrease global warming have failed. 

"I think, while we should not read too much into a single day above 2 degrees Celsius (or 1.5 degrees Celsius for that matter), it's a startling sign nonetheless of the level of extreme global temperatures we are experiencing in 2023,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Stripe and Berkeley Earth, told The Washington Post.

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Scientists would consider the average global temperature breached only when it would surpass the two-degree benchmark for months and years. 

However, the ominous milestone is another alarming sign that climate change is heading in a dangerous direction.

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If the global average temperature consistently exceeds the ideal threshold for extended periods, we may soon experience the hazardous impacts of global warming that scientists have been warning us about.

Everyday variations around global temperature standards, which have slowly ascended for decades, pushed the planet over the hazardous barrier for the first time on Friday. After months of record warmth that have stunned many scientists, temperatures have continued to rise, defying expectations.

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Dr Samantha Burgess, the deputy director of the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service, posted on social media platform X that Friday's global temperatures were 1.17 degrees Celsius above the 1991-2020 average, a record-setting margin. Given how much human-caused warming had occurred by that period, he wrote in the post, "Our best estimate is that this was the first day when global temperature was more than two degrees Celsius above 1850-1900 (or pre-industrial) levels, at 2.06°C."

The European model used to determine global warmth estimates climate conditions in real-time using the same observations as weather predictions. Scientists will soon be able to confirm the record warmth through direct observations that they will gather and vet in the coming weeks.

(With inputs from agencies)

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